Isaac Hamlet, Iowa City Press-Citizen Published 12:07 p.m. CT July 22, 2020

One of the sketchs by Brandon Drew Holmes done for PromptPress' forthcoming Afrofuturist collection. The images includes a picture of slave trade routes out of Africa.(Photo: From PromptPress)

The unfurling ofpossible futures froma year agohassynthesized as futures do into a presentmomentequal parts unpredictable and inevitable. In this moment, anAfrofuturistcollection, the product of collaboration between PromptPress and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS), in its final phase of cultivation.

"Afrofuturism is a really exciting area of art to explore," said Kalmia Strong, the Book Arts Editor on this collection,a year ago. "What does it mean to try to create a future world where people of color are equally sharing in a positive way, which has not been the history of this country?"

The text planned for anAugust release,but not yet officially titled collectseight artists, largelyof the African diaspora. Visual artist Brandon Drew Holmes provided the illustrated images in the text to which the writers responded.

"I love Brandon's work because it lives in poetry and visual art at the same time, a divide I'm always trying to straddle myself," Anas Duplan, the founder of CAS,told the Press-Citizen in an email. "These particular drawings make such efficient use of space and reference a rich pop cultural world and imagination."

Allfour of the illustrations depict multiple subjects sometimes seemingly disparate. One includes two pop animations above the image of an apparently gay Black man across from another faintly realized image. Another shows the tracks of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade out of Africa above a pair of Black hands, a sign reading "Whites Only" and the text "A man people becomes invisible."

The works created in response are primarily poetic in form and vary in topics from a socialized sense of "otherness"to Black femininity.

"One of my former students dee(dee) Redd has a poem in this collection and I believe it's their first print publication,"Duplan said."I was impressed with their work when I taught them and thought it was only a matter of time before they started publishing more work. Their work is steeped in Black radical theory and, like Brandon's drawings, make really elegant and innovative use of space.

Most includedcreators were selectedby Duplan, but the publication was open to outside submissions, which is how Andrew David King came to be included.

Past issues are displayed on shelves, Wednesday, June 19, 2019, at Prompt Press along Iowa Avenue in Iowa City, Iowa.(Photo: Joseph Cress/Iowa City Press-Citizen)

"I became aware of PromptPress through my friend, who was interning there last summer," recalled King, who graduated from the University of Iowa with an master's degree in poetry last year. "I would come by and visit him in the press's reading room. I found the call for submission on Instagram and started looking at (Holmes') work. The pieces stayed with me; not long after, I began a poem in response to them."

King is the only white contributor to the publication, but still derived broader systemic issues he could speak to in the margins of the racial focus of the prompts.

"Although Holmes' drawings are 'about' race and racial violence, they also see to be 'about' a peculiarly American form of trauma, one with partial origins in prosperity-gospel Protestantism and capitalism," notedKing.

His hope is that his own poem "earns its presence" in the collection.

King's submission, "Theory of Regeneration," is a poem the author sees as growing from out of his ownsense of loneliness and displacement.

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While the text and interior images have been determined,the design that contains these items is still being determined.

A sketch by Brandon Drew Holmes done for PromptPress' forthcoming Afrofuturist collection. This picture features portraits of Black girls and women.(Photo: From PromptPress)

PromptPress is an ekphrastic journal with an emphasis on book art, with many of its publications challenging how a text is physically presented and thus examining how that presentation can amplify the text.

As for the future of this Afrofuturist collection, Duplan gives the impression that thisforthcoming effort is a singularity rather than a recurrent thing.

"PromptPress does a lovely job of seeking people out to guest-curate their issues," Duplan said."We'll be having a reading of the issue we put together on Montez Press Radio in August, and I hope folks tune into that."

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PromptPress to release Afrofuturist collection in collaboration with CAS in August - Iowa City Press-Citizen