SALON: Poet and writer Colin Channer as part of the Open Sesame project

Rhode Island's relationship with food is a multi-sensory connector influencing the sense of place and identity for many throughout its diverse history. Poet and fiction writer Colin Channer will read and discuss poems arising from encounters with books, maps, and documents about food in the Athenæum’s archives. The exploration continues the journey of his artistic life - all the multitude of ways in which his own travels, his migrations, including the one from his birthplace, Jamaica, to the United States, have required him to be flexible, to be responsive, to be intellectually capacious, and to find the Caribbean and African culture everywhere he calls home.

Funded by the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, the Open Sesame project brings together a diverse group of six artists/scholars working in different genres to research in the Athenaeum’s extensive collections.

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Colin Channer lives and works in Providence. He writers novels, novellas, poems, occasional essays, and lots of lists. His most recent work is the poetry collection Providential (2015), which Eileen Myles calls “one of the most lucid and telling books of this exact time.” He was born in Jamaica. He turned writer in New York. Providential was completed with the generous support of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.