See Jane Write member Kwoya Fagin Maples is on a mission to make more people fall in love in with poetry and she believes another medium of expression holds the key: visual art.

“Most people who have never been to a poetry reading have seen visual art,” Kwoya says. “I believe they are comfortable with visual art because they can experience it on their own terms.”

Each year for the past three years Kwoya has challenged her creative writing students at the Alabama School of Fine Arts to create visual representations of their poetry including original photography, sculpture, paintings, and film. But this is more than a simple class project. At the end of the school year the pieces are displayed in a gallery at an exhibit that’s open to the public.

The 2017 3-D Poetry Exhibit will be on display May 16 to May 19 from 10 am to 5 pm at Space One Eleven, located at 2409 2nd Avenue North in Birmingham. There will be an opening reception on Friday, May 12 at 6 p.m. 

The theme for this year’s exhibit is Chimera: Re-imagined Memory.

Kwoya explains: “The focus of this year’s exhibit will be speculative poetry that re-investigates and recreates past, lived experiences. Like returning to a dream with power, we will return to our past experiences and construct a different outcome that looks more like what we want. This work will also go beyond the self, imagining a world where specific historical events are re-written, and yes, re-imagined.”

Learn more about Kwoya Fagin Maples here.