Nappy Loc: Dontay Givens (he/they) is an English writing major with art history & sociology minors, they attend Wheaton College. Dontay loves to blend elements of horror, magical realism, naturalism and the fantastic to (re) create genres that contemplate the nothingness that lays within the absurdity of human existence. Dontay writes to explore the tortured nature of existing within a system that must consume Black flesh to exist; Dontay's narrative and poetry exists at the nexus of the contemplation of nothingness and the onto-epistemological structure that constitutes Black existence. Dontay writes for the in-between, dwelling in the space between presence and nothingness, misery and joy, brilliance and darkness. Dontay writes in an attempt to move fluidly between these seemingly binary state of beings. Dontay writes because they learned that nothingness is the most grotesque presence they have ever felt; yet, they have drawn from that grotesqueness to transfigure something in response to that nothingness. Writing is not about a utopian idealism; writing is staring down the material conditions and writing about them accurately and precisely.

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THE COMPLAINT OF THE LOVE POET