Defacing the Monument

Defacing the Monument opens with the narration of an Operation Streamline hearing, a proceeding during which as many as 75 undocumented migrants are criminally prosecuted and sentenced en masse to serve jail time prior to deportation. It's an attempt to bear witness to what happens to those who do not hold the "correct" documents as a way to show texts always bear the marks of power. Documentary poetics offers a tradition and a form through which a writer can situate events or experiences within broad social and historical contexts. It can provide a space to record, to unearth, to witness, and to contextualize. But we can't fetishize the document. And we must use it with an eye toward our own complicity and participation in the systems we wish to investigate. Part documentary act, part lyric essay, part criticism, Defacing the Monument enacts the possibilities and limits of documentary impulses.

Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation's Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In a starred review, Publisher's Weekly calls the collection "a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others' stories" and a "dazzlingly inventive and searching text." Briante is also the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders.

Briante writes creative nonfiction and essays on documentary poetics. Some of these can be found in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Creative Nonfiction, Rethinking History, Jacket2 and The Believer. Her poems and essays been collected in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2021, Bodies Built for Game (The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing), The Poetry of Capital (Univ of Wisc.), Poems for Political Disaster (Boston Review), The Arcadia Project: the North American Postmodern Pastoral, Starting Today: Poems for Obama's First 100 Days, The Sonnets: Rewriting Shakespeare, and An Introduction to the Prose Poem.

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A translator, she lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. Her translations have appeared in the journals Bomb, Bombay Gin, Translation Review and Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (among many others) as well as in the anthologies Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry and Hotel Lautreamont: Contemporary Poetry of Uruguay.

Her research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, creative nonfiction, cross-genre writing, experimental autobiography, documentary studies, affect theory, and translation. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. She serves as the co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. The Southwest Field Studies in Writing program amplifies voices and expands dialogue on issues related to the border by sending three Creative Writing MFA students to engage in reciprocal research and write during a two-week residency in Patagonia, AZ, on projects unique to the borderlands.