Excerpted from Fred Moten’s poem ‘the red sheaves,’ forthcoming in “perennial fashion presence falling” (Wave Books, May 2023).

Fred Moten works in the departments of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University. He is concerned with social movement, aesthetic experiment and Black study, and has written a number of books of poetry and criticism, the latest of which, written with Stefano Harney, is “All Incomplete” (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2021). In addition to his long-term collaboration with Harney, Moten is engaged in ongoing work with critic Laura Harris, artist Wu Tsang and musicians Gerald Cleaver and Brandon López. Moten is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book “perennial fashion presence falling” is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2023.