Saturday, April 27th, 2 pm RSVP
Poet DJ Savarese explains, “When I’m not confined to writing in response to language but am prompted instead by the expansiveness of visual art, I find a way into my thoughts and imagination that I’ve never accessed before.” In this reading, he turns his attention to the artwork of various artists with disabilities, poetically dancing and conversing with them and their chosen languages of drawing, painting, and sculpting.
David James “DJ” Savarese is an artful activist, multi-genre writer, teacher, and public
scholar. A 2022-23 Iowa Arts Fellow and Zoeglossia Fellow, he is the author
of Swoon (2022), including 2 poems nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In addition to a co-
authored chapbook Studies in Brotherly Love (PromptPress, 2021) and a poetic series A
Doorknob for the Eye (2017), his poems have been published by Poetry Foundation, Poem-a-
Day, Split This Rock, A Hole in the Wall, The Red Wheelbarrow, Seneca Review, Bellingham
Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Stone Canoe, Prospect, wordgatherings, and The Art of Autism. His
lyric essay “Passive Plants”, published in the Iowa Review, was a Pushcart Prize nominee
and a notable essay in Best American Essays (2018). He teaches inclusive,
multigenerational, global poetry writing classes through Listen2Us and poetry writing
courses for alternatively communicating autistics through the LYNX Project in Chicago. A
public scholar, he teaches and presents nationally on a range of topics, including the NEH-
sponsored talk on “Disrupting Ableism Through Artful Activism.” More recent
scholarship includes an article in Logic Magazine titled “Disrupting the Garden Wall”; a co-
authored essay titled “Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One
Family Talk about Art and Disability” in Er(r)go; and a chapter “Unearthing the Concepts
That Bury Us,” in the scholarly anthology, Disability in Dialogue. He is also the co-producer,
narrative commentator, and subject of the Peabody award-winning documentary Deej:
Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery (2017). Before moving to Iowa City, DJ graduated with a
double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Oberlin College in 2017.
PHOTO BY PAMELA HARVEY PHOTOGRAPHY.