BIOGRAPHY

Alison C. Rollins (she/her) holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. In 2021, she was selected by contest judge Kiese Laymon as the winner of the Gulf Coast prize in nonfiction. Her work, across genres, has appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and is a recipient of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. A 2020 Pushcart Prize winner, her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Much of Rollins’ work celebrates the Black American experience and the ways in which cataloging, technology, information, and identities are inextricably entangled. Her work explores the fragile line between "human" and "nonhuman" beings, encouraging a social justice focused art practice that seeks to collaborate with plants, animals, and robots.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Quartet for the End of Time is a four-prong project that consists of a poetry collection, a visual art installation with the capacity to be activated, a series of performance art pieces, and a libretto titled Black Bell. This project incorporates and melds Rollins' work across disciplines, including but not limited to: literary arts, metalwork at the Providence Steel Yard, sculpture, letterpress printing, and sonics. Points of reference for the project include visual artist Nick Cave, the music of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Sun Ra & His Arkestra's Sleeping Beauty, and Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, as well as 19th century historical figures such as Henry "Box" Brown, Lear Green, and Harriet Jacobs. An innovative meditation on Black fugitivity as well as concepts of queer temporality, Quartet for the End of Time provides imaginative interventions surrounding how subject and object positions might be destabilized, and how, in turn, subjectivity and society might be reciprocally shaped with the potential for more liberatory possibilities.