HOLY AMERICAN BURNOUT: Reading and Signing with Sean Enfield

Let’s talk about the great American condition: burnout.

Local author Sean Enfield will be at Kenosha Creative Space on Wednesday, December 13th from 7 to 9 p.m. to talk about his newly-published collection of essays “Holy American Burnout!,” which weaves personal essay and cultural critique into the historical fabric of Black and bi-racial identity.

Joining Sean are three other writers who will be sharing their own personal and cultural commentary through poetry, essays, and narrative stories. This event will be particularly relevant to teachers and students, as Sean analyzes this growing trend of working to burnout through classroom narratives and his experiences as a teacher.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Sean Enfield delves into the great American condition: burnout.

Threading his experiences both as a Texan student and later as a first-year teacher of predominately Muslim students at a Texas middle school, Holy American Burnout! weaves personal essay and cultural critique into the historical fabric of Black and bi-racial identity.

Enfield intersects examinations of which voices are granted legitimacy by virtue of school curriculum, the complex relationship between basketball and education for Black and brown students, his students’ burgeoning political consciousness during the 2016 presidential campaign, and cultural figures ranging from Kendrick Lamar to Hamlet.

These classroom narratives weave around Enfield’s own formative experiences contending with a conflicted bi-racial family lineage, reenacting the Middle Passage as the only Black student in his 7th grade history class, and moshing in both Christian and secular hardcore pits.

As Enfield wrestles with the physical, mental, and emotional burdens that American society places on educators, students, and all relatively conscious minorities in this country, he reaches for an education that better navigates our burnt-out empire.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Sean Enfield is an essayist, poet, gardener, bassist, and educator from Dallas, TX. His writing attempts to find connection through music and words as reclamation of labor as community care and as resistance to the many forces of white supremacy working against marginalized bodies. You can find his work at seanenfield.com.

Lorna Pecard is a neurodivergent poet and essayist from Milwaukee. She received her MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. You can find her reading in the sunroom or curled up somewhere.

Angela Voras-Hills’s first collection of poems, Louder Birds (Pleiades 2020), was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets, and New Ohio Review, among other journals and anthologies. She has received support from The Sustainable Arts Foundation, Key West Literary Seminar, and Writers’ Room of Boston. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, WI, where she is a PhD Student at UW-Milwaukee.

Antonio Vargas-Nieto is a Mexican born writer, teaching artist, and emulsion enthusiast. He is a 2022-2023 Poetry Coalition Fellow and has been featured in Spectra, Moody, and Silver Operation. Antonio is based in Milwaukee, WI.