Sonia Farmer’s script A True & Exact History was selected as part of the second annual What Happens: A Festival of Poets Theater. Co-organized by students in the Writers’ Workshop and the Directing MFA at the University of Iowa, this annual festival brings together poets and theater artists from within and beyond the University to curate innovative performances that press the boundaries of both theater and poetry.

An erasure poem first presented in an artist book, A True & Exact History can also be experienced as a sound piece. Using eleven speakers to represent the eleven separate parishes of Barbados, their voices inhabit and exchange threads of dispersed narratives, ultimately calling into question what it means to write “a true and exact history” of anything.

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Directed by Morgan Grambo and starring Zamora Simmons, Marquise Jackson, Jivani Rodriguez, Alexi Bolden, and Zachary Oren Smith, the performance took place on March 1 at Public Space One in Iowa City.