Poetry in Motion: A Black Feminist Inquiry in Sound and Story

• In Event: Artist Salons as Sites of Unforgetting: Reimagining Liberatory-Education through Plays, Film, Poetry, Novella, and Collage

Abstract

This demonstration, Poetry in Motion, offers a multisensory performance that treats poetry as research itself. Drawing from an ongoing ethnographic study with Black adolescent girls in intergenerational dialogue, it affirms poetic expression as theory, analysis, and archive. It models a liberatory research praxis that is aesthetic, affective, and collaborative, refusing academic traditions that marginalize poetic expression, Black girls’ knowledge-making, and embodied scholarship.

Grounded in Black girlhood studies (Discussant, 2013), this work honors Black girls’ lived experiences and creative expressions as epistemologically rich sites of knowing. It builds on Audre Lorde’s (1985) belief that “poetry is not a luxury.” It stands on the shoulders of the work of Alice Walker (1983), and affirms that artistry is “work our souls must have” (p. 241). Finally, it joins Coles and Player (2024) in asserting that artistic practice is a foundational methodological theory of justice: a way of knowing, witnessing, and co-constructing worlds rooted in liberation and imagination.

This demonstration emerges from poetic inquiry. It features a narrative poem, interwoven with a video montage co-curated with a group of Black girl adolescent co-researchers from a northeastern high school. The video includes early artifacts from our study, including voice memos, poems, digital stories, and audio reflections. These artifacts enact a poetics of witness (Foché, 2011) and invite participants to consider What might it mean to listen to Black girls’ creative work not just as data, but as research in and of itself?

The montage functions as creative expression and analytical product, surfacing Black girls’ voices and visions as valid knowledge. Created over several months, it emerged through collaboration with Black adolescent girls reflecting on their schooling; elder Black women alumni of the same school; and a Black woman artist-scholar-educator who is an alum of the same school and who facilitates and co-witnesses the process.

The piece reveals how Black girls use digital storytelling to theorize layered critiques of schooling, identity-making, and resistance. Their creative renderings hold grief and joy in both subtle and bold ways. Poetry in Motion offers evidence that collaborative, poetic approaches expand our understandings of what counts as knowledge and who gets to produce it.

Aligned with AERA’s 2025 theme, Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures, this demonstration extends the pedagogical lineage of Harlem Renaissance salons, particularly the work of Jessie Fauset. Called “the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance” by Langston Hughes, Fauset nurtured poetry and editorial mentorship as tools for Black youth to think, dream, and critique (Murray, 2025). This work carries forward her ethos, insisting that poetic inquiry is a Black Feminist origin point. Poetry in Motion insists on the scholarly legitimacy of poetic inquiry and invites educational researchers to reimagine the form, purpose, and politics of what research can be.

Author

• Autumn A. Griffin, University of North Carolina - Charlotte