We the People of the United States…Promote the General Welfare
Disability Poetics with Camisha Jones and torrin a. greathouse
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Booking and details
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Dates Tues, Feb 25, 2025 at 7:30pm
Venue Folger Theatre
Tickets $20
Duration 60 minutes
Please note: Children under the age of 4 are not permitted.
Promoting the general welfare is commonly interpreted as improving transportation, promoting agriculture and industry, protecting health and the environment, and seeking ways to solve social and economic problems. But what has America done to promote the general welfare of all people, including the many Americans who have disabilities? Folger Poetry continues its exploration of Whose Democracy? with readings by poets torrin a. greathouse and Camisha L. Jones whose present works probe the erasure of disabled voices. This reading had originally included recently passed DC poet Kathi Wolfe, who will be honored and remembered during the reading.
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About the poets
![Three-quarter profile photograph of Camisha Jones, outdoors with a tree in the right background](https://images.folger.edu/uploads/2024/07/Jones_Camisha_Photo_by_Brandon_Woods-1.jpg?fit=50%2C50)
Camisha Jones
Camisha L. Jones is the author of Flare, a poetry chapbook published by Finishing Line Press in 2017 focused on her experiences with hearing loss and chronic pain. Her poems have been published in The New York Times, Poets.org, Button Poetry, The Deaf Poets Society, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Typo, The Quarry, and elsewhere. Other writing can be found at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts’ website and Class Lives: Stories From Across Our Economic Divide, published by ILR Press in 2014.
Photograph by Brendan Jones.
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torrin a. greathouse
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. Their work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, Zoeglossia, The Ragdale Foundation, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. They are the author of DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), a Minnesota Book Award and CLMP Firecracker Award finalist, and winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Read a poem
Accommodation
By Camisha L. Jones
The law wants my body reasonable
My body won’t fence in its demands
Expects the world to stop
Whenever it wants to lay down
Throws up its middle finger
At deadlines, task lists,
Long awaited meetings
It ain’t open to negotiation
Wants you to stop telling it to
Calm down
It has three settings: rest, spark, flare
All that talk about your inconvenience & your hardship
It calls that Bullshit
It will not wait in line
It will not be polite
It will not use its inside voice
It wants all the space
In every room of the house
The entire sky & the full lawn of grass
It wants to set it all aflame
My body is a pyromaniac
My body is the art
Of Angela Bassett’s right hand
Letting reason go up in smoke
Originally published by The Deaf Poets Society. Copyright © 2017 by Camisha L. Jones. Used with the permission of the author.
For more poems by Camisha L. Jones, visit poets.org.