The Rite to Remain: Poetry, Race, and Resistance

Catalog description

As Poet Laureate of San Mateo County and the author of Gentefication and the forthcoming collection The Right to Remain Violets (University of Arizona Press, 2026), Antonio Lopez invites students into a creative seminar on how poetry can speak back to power, history, and silence. This course explores poetry as both testimony and transformation - an art of survival that renders grief, memory, and resistance audible. Drawing inspiration from Lopez's own hybrid poetic practice, students will read across traditions of race and resistance, including Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Amiri Baraka, Gloria Anzaldua, Garrett Hongo, Claudia Rankine, Aracelis Girmay, and Ocean Vuong. Through weekly writing workshops, close readings, and community discussions, students will experiment with form and voice while considering how poetry functions as both witness and refuge. The course culminates in a final portfolio and reflective artist statement articulating each student's own rite to remain.