Calvin Walds

Calvin Walds is a writer, an educator, and community member originally from Detroit, Michigan. As a writer, Calvin recently won the 2020 Split/Lip press Hybrid/Nonfiction chapbook prize for “Flee” which will be published in March 2021. His poems are forthcoming in No, Dear magazine and DIAGRAM, and have been published in the African-American Review, Hyperallergic, the Poetry Project Newsletter, among other places. As an educator who has taught in Sunflower County, in the Mississippi Delta, Ramallah, in the Occupied Palestinean Territories, and most recently in New York City, Calvin has designed and taught classes on critical contemporary issues such as the ‘Literature of Mass Incarceration”, “Literature of the Global South”, and ‘The Art of Protest’. Calvin works to teach from an abolitionist, decolonial pedagogy, partially by connecting students with activists, artists, and community members who are addressing the issues and questions being explored. Calvin comes from an interdisciplinary academic background, and is currently a MFA candidate at UCSD in Cross-Genre Writing (focus on poetics). He holds graduate degrees in both Pan-African Studies and General and Special Education, and a BA in Political Science and Ethnic Studies, with a minor in History. Right now, he is primarily interested in questions of fugitivity as an artistic practice and mode of resistance, anticolonial film and literature, the poetics of relation, and the painter Beauford Delaney’s engagement of figuration and abstraction.

Updated September 2020