Divya Victor

We at Jacket2 are in solidarity with the artist/writer and activist Angelo V. Suárez and his partner, the choreographer/artist and activist Donna Miranda. Angelo and Donna are part of the group now called the Tinang 83, a group of eighty-three artists, writers, and activists from the Philippines who are advocating for agrarian and environmental justice, working on behalf of farmers in the region. In an early June incident of police and state brutality against farmers and their supporters in Tinang — a town in Concepcion, Tarlac, in the Philippines — eighty-three activists were accosted in the one of the biggest mass arrests in recent memory. Among those arrested with Angelo and Donna is the Biennale multimedia artist Cian Dayrit. Days before his arrest, ArtNet News identified Dayrit as one of brightest stars of the Bienniale circuit, along with established artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Superflex, and Forensic Architecture.

Orchid Tierney reviews three 2021 titles that explore survival in periods of crisis: Poem That Never Ends by Silvina López Medin (Essay Press, 2021); A Feeling Called Heaven by Joey Yearous-Algozin (Nightboat Books, 2021); and Curb by Divya Victor (Nightboat Books, 2021).

It is hard to express how much Divya Victor has enriched and expanded Jacket2 since we first welcomed her as a (then-guest) editor in 2017. From the two commentary series she’s contributed, to the thoughtful and wide-reaching features she’s curated, not to mention the tireless work she’s done behind the scenes to make Jacket2’s editorial process more equitable, affirming, and innovative, Divya’s presence as a member of the J2 team will be sorely missed. It is with sadness — but excitement for Divya as a thinker and writer — that we say goodbye to Divya as a J2 editor. 

We at J2 are pleased to share a call for papers for the upcoming conference At the Dusk of Literature? — Twenty-First-Century North American Writing in Extremis. Editor Divya Victor will appear as the conference’s keynote speaker and draws from her recent J2 feature, “Extreme Texts.”  The conference will take place September 28–30, 2020, at the University of Łódź, Poland, and is organized by Dr. Małgorzata Myk and Mark Tardi. For Divya Victor, writing the call for papers in 2017 only several months into Trump’s presidency meant taking into account the reality in which “a majority of Americans had acquiesced to live, normally, under extreme conditions, with denuded civil rights, attenuated freedoms of press, increasing inequality of wages, and diminishing access to medical care, and under misogynist, transphobic, and supremacist policies.” “Extreme Texts” offers an impressive range of modes of thinking about the notion of extremity in contemporary experimental poetry and poetics, reclaiming the term’s complexity visible in the ways the contributors investigated the condition of texts in terms of their own limit(s) and excess(es).  For more information, visit the full call for papers.

Jacket2 is seeking short scholarly articles, essays, belletristic documents, creative responses, and ephemera concerned with “Extreme Texts.” This call welcomes writing on, about, and as “Extremity” in its multifarious meanings and implications, from the material to the ideological, from the word’s connotations as “catastrophe” or “limit event” to its denotation as “the farthest point” something can go.

Jacket2 is delighted to welcome Divya Victor to our team as our new guest editor. Divya has long been a friend of the journal: she has curated and edited two extraordinary features, “Discourses on Vocality” and “Conceptual writing (plural and global) and other cultural productions” — the latter of which is one of our most massive and ambitious features to date — and written insightfully on her time in Singapore as part of our Commentaries section. She is a prolific poet whose titles include the award-winning Natural Subjects (reviewed here), UNSUB, Things to Do with Your Mouth, Swift Taxidermies 1919–1922, Goodbye, John! On John Baldessari, PUNCH, and more.