Lauren Nicole Nixon is an up-and-coming poet based in Brooklyn, New York. She moved to New York from Maryland in order to study an intriguing combination of Gender/ Sexuality Studies and Dance at New York University´s Tisch School of the Arts. From Dance Studies, Lauren gained insights into the richness of the information which the body can pass on and learned to see this information as being just as valuable as cognitive information. Although, Lauren now no longer dances after having sustained an injury earlier in 2011, the importance of the body and bodily histories are still a significant influence on her poetry. Lauren sees all bodies as marked and as political and is interested in the relationships which exist between bodies. Poetry is, for her, a way of writing her body into history, while simultaneously remaining aware of the fact that some bodies have been written out of history and some bodies were never even included in history in the first place. “Blackness” also plays an important role in Lauren´s work. What it means to be a black woman and what it meant to be a black girl are questions which she is constantly seeking to explore through her poetry.

Lauren has taken part in a number of performances which have seen her perform her poetry whilst dancing, allowing the words she is speaking to be reflected in the movements she is making and vice versa. In our interview Lauren talks about one example of such “movement artistry”,which she realized in February 2011 at Dixon Place in New York in cooperation with the Belladonna Collaborative. She is familiar with the complexities and rewards of collaboration between poets and choreographers.

Lauren sees the end of her dance career as actually having been a blessing in disguise, however, since she can now go devote her time and energy to what she sees as being her first and greatest love: poetry. Her first published work of poetry, a chapbook entitled There´s a jukebox in the back, will be available in summer 2012, published by Dancing Girl Press.

You can find our more about Lauren Nicole Nixon and her work by visiting her website.

—Claire Hart

[mp3player width=239 height=336 config=one-world-cafe.xml playlist=lauren-nicole-nixon.xml]