“we are worth wanting each other”

The ICA here in Philly is paying tribute to one of the city’s most profound angels…Essex Hemphill. Today, world aids day, they are streaming Tiona McClodden’s “Af-fixing Ceremony: Four Movements for Essay.”

Watch here: icaphila.org
Essex Hemphill (born 1957, Chicago; died 1995, Philadelphia) was a poet
and performer who openly addressed race, identity, sexuality, HIV/AIDS,
and the family, voicing issues central to the African-American gay
community. His first collections of poems were the self-published
chapbooks Earth Life (1985) and Conditions (1986). His first full-length
collection, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (1992), won the National Library
Association’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual New Author Award. His work is
included in the anthologies Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1986)
and Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS (1993). Hemphill’s poetry
and his performances with the group Cinque were featured in the films
Looking for Langston (1989), Tongues Untied (1989), and Black Is … Black
Ain’t (1994). He received fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts and grants from the Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in the Arts
and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He was a visiting
scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in
Santa Monica, California.