Drawing While Black Vol. 1: Book Launch Listening Dinner Party 

Straight from the mouth of Dr. Maurice Moore:

"And de Category is!!!!!!!!! Book Launch!  People of de world especially Knoxville TN, You're invited to Dr. Maurice Moore’s Drawing While Black Vol 1 Mixtape aka a Book Launch Listening Dinner Party! Now if dat ain’t doin de mos! Snap!  An evening dat promises:  Sweets fo de sweet!  Savory fa de Savory! Wit jus enough flava! Ta raise de ancestors! And a special After Party"  

Amongst many things, Dr. Moore is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They're newest book, Drawing While Black Mixtape Vol 1, is a text composed of visual poems that explore various types of queer mark-making. Published by Versal Journal,  and winner of their 2022 Amsterdam Open Book Prize, Maurice Moore’s Drawing While Black Mixtape Vol 1 is a text composed of visual poems that explore various types of queer mark-making. 

Mark-making dat allows Blk nonbinary people such as Moore the space and freedom to push further and engage wit balancing and negotiating the joys & pains Black performers experience both inside and outside African and African American Diasporas as creatives. De tracks were created by incorporating elements of performance-drawing to create immersive environments and engaging experiences relating to race, gender identity, and gender expression, coupled with black hxstories and cultural diasporic traditions in Amerikkka.

As the work evolved, Moore continued to consider what digital, analog, and ephemeral marks do if we let them be themselves. The many, many, many marks in these works were created by engaging wit Beautiful Black Blackty Blk figures of all shapes and sizes in the Black and Queer diaspora. Next, Moore decided to put their foot in it, and infuse the work with African American Vernacular/Gesture English (AAVE) and image/visual/gestural descriptions, thereby further expanding queer mark-making. They are drawing with vocabularies, sources, bibliographies, scripts, and image descriptions; remixing past drawings; collaging visuals and texts; and incorporating queer Black theory to create these new experimental marks.