Past Events

Guest Speaker G'Ra Asim with Jabari Asim - Boyz n the Void

About Boyz n the Void

Writing to his brother, G'Ra Asim reflects on building his own identity while navigating Blackness, masculinity, and young adulthood--all through wry social commentary and music/pop culture critique.

How does one approach Blackness, masculinity, otherness, and the perils of young adulthood? For G'Ra Asim, punk music offers an outlet to express himself freely. As his younger brother, Gyasi, grapples with finding his footing in the world, G'Ra gifts him with a survival guide for tackling the sometimes treacherous cultural terrain particular to being young, Black, brainy, and weird in the form of a mixtape.

Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother blends music and cultural criticism and personal essay to explore race, gender, class, and sexuality as they pertain to punk rock and straight edge culture. Using totemic punk rock songs on a mixtape to anchor each chapter, the book documents an intergenerational conversation between a Millennial in his 30s and his Generation Z teenage brother. Author, punk musician, and straight edge kid, G'Ra Asim weaves together memoir and cultural commentary, diving into the depths of everything from theory to comic strips, to poetry to pizza commercials to mapping the predicament of the Black creative intellectual.

With each chapter dedicated to a particular song and placed within the context of a fraternal bond, Asim presents his brother with a roadmap to self-actualization in the form of a Doc Martened foot to the behind and a sweaty, circle-pit-side-armed hug.

About the Speakers

G'Ra Asim, a writer and musician, is an assistant professor of nonfiction writing at Ithaca College. He holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and a BA in writing, literature and publishing from Emerson College. He has served as writing director at the African American Policy Forum and as graduate teaching fellow in Columbia's Undergraduate Writing Program. His work has appeared in Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Baffler, and The New Republic. When not writing prose or teaching, he sings, plays bass and writes lyrics for NYC DIY pop punk band babygotbacktalk, who were named one of Afropunk's Top 8 Punkest Bands on the Planet Right Now.

Jabari Asim is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts and the author of seven books for adults-including We Can't Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival-and ten books for children. His poems are included in several anthologies, including Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present; Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century; and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. After more than a decade at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Washington Post, he now directs the MFA program at Emerson College.