Unexplained Presence

About Tisa Bryant

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works 2007; Wave Books 2024) a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative possibility The Encyclopedia Project and co-editor with Ernest Hardy of War Diaries an anthology on black gay mens desire and survival published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles and a finalist for a 2010 LAMBDA literary award. Her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogs for visual artists Laylah Ali Jaime Cortez Wura-Natasha Ogunji Suné Woods and Cauleen Smith and is forthcoming in the anthology Letters to the Future: Black Experimental Women Writers and in a catalogue of site-specific art from The New School. She has done numerous presentations of cinema essays most recently at ALOUD's School of Prince event at the Los Angeles Public Library and at Speak Nearby a symposium of text and performance inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Tisa Bryant was a commissioned writer/researcher for Radio Imagination Clockshops year-long Los Angeles celebration of science fiction writer Octavia Butler in collaboration with the Huntington Library in Pasadena which houses the Octavia E. Butler Papers. She is working on The Curator a novel of Black female subjectivity and imagined cinema. Residual a meditation on grief longing desire and archival research is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.