Bio

S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a 2023 The Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow and has received generous support from Cave Canem, PEN America, and PERIPLUS among other honors. Author of the chapbook, Glory to All Fleeting Things, her poetry has been published and anthologized internationally in wildness, Michigan Quarterly Review and Meridians, and her artwork has exhibited in New York. Batiste’s writing and collage centers Black women, her ancestors and matrilineage, and is influenced by Afrofuturism, maximalism, beauty, the desert, the cosmos and other expansive places, migration, tarot and divination, archives, ephemera and moments left behind. She is currently working on her first full length collection, Hoard.

Statement

I do Black women’s work. My work centers the lives and experiences of Black women, ancestors, myself and my own matrilineage. My work examines freedom, the complexity of memory, what we consider history, and the ways we all inherit and collect possessions and stories. Nearly everything challenges my existence as a Black woman living at the end of the world and the American Experiment, and so my work intentionally and intensely concentrates on these selfhoods.

I am an interdisciplinary poet and much of my work relies on history and archives as a primary source. I want readers and viewers to take away a sense of beauty and history, however, I want their notion of what is beautiful and what is history to be challenged. I want viewers coming to the work with their own various information (i.e. race, gender, age, class, geography) to leave feeling like whatever ideas they initially carried have been complicated. I want viewers to consider their own privileges and think about the daily ways in which we are all complicit in white supremacy, capitalism and the systems devouring and destroying us, as a human race. I want to present and represent the real and whole America–its past, present, and possible futures: free, feminist, radical, abolitionist, anarchist, extraterrestrial, other.

These collages/visual poems were created recently from December 2022 to present day following my participation in the Kolaj Institute New Orleans Collage Artist Lab where we worked under the theme of "City as Archive" incorporating archives from the New Orleans Public Library along with our own materials. In my personal search in the library archives, I was stunned by the absence of Blackness in this historically very Black city, whose existence was built by, depended on and dependent on Black people, and also where my father's Creole family originated and eventually migrated from.  

Sadly, the majority of the Black photographs found were in the carceral state–mugshots and "Bertillon Cards," however, I was able to locate some fleeting moments of Black people in comfort, giving and receiving care, in quiet rebellion to the larger archive. I archived 118 Black and mixed-race Black women with the deep consideration that during the time their mugshots were captured, photography was still early tech, so these were likely the only photographs ever taken of these Black women in their lives. These works, all sourced from library archival photographs taken in the early to mid-20th century, have become part of a new, ongoing series "Major Arcana," where I am using the archives along with images from the Hubble Telescope and space, and other protective symbology to help transport the persons pictured into other possible universes and dimensions where they might receive care, dignity and softness, beyond what they may have imagined in their lifetimes and in this world.  

Let these works serve as archive, testimonial, reimagination, and witness.

https://www.sbatistewrites.com/