Speculation, N. - Paperback

by Shayla Lawz (Author)

speculation, n. by Shayla Lawz won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and imagines a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death.

Shayla Lawz's debut collection brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean--in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media--to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death.

The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real--a refracted past and present--through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities.

Author Biography

Shayla Lawz is a fiction writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ, working at the intersection of text, sound, and performance. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden, and The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) where she was the 2024 Dream Space Resident. She has served as the inaugural writer-in-residence at The Hurston/Wright Foundation and has been a visiting writer at The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Rutgers University, and Brown University where she received her MFA in fiction. Her debut poetry collection speculation, n. (2021) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and has been featured in Poets & Writers, The Slowdown, and NPR's On the Record. She lives in Brooklyn where she is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.