Fred Moten’s areas of study and practice are Black Studies, Critical Theory, Performance Studies, and Poetics. His writing has included scholarly texts In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and consent not to be a single being, several books of poetry, and ongoing collaborations with theorist Stefano Harney (they are co-authors of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and A Poetics of the Undercommons) and artist Wu Tsang (they are authors of Who Touched Me?). Moten’s capacious investigations are marked by the appositional consideration of ostensibly disparate figures from the realms of free jazz, popular music, contemporary art, and continental philosophy as interpreted through the lens of the black radical tradition. His recognition of the already given and forceful presence of of the vernacular in high theory and vice versa pervades both his critical writing and poetry, blurring distinctions between the two and undermining the very notion of their binary nature in the polyphonic mode of interstitial jazz improvisation. He lives in New York and teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. For his appearance at James Cohan Gallery, Moten will lend his solemn and hypnotic baritone to a reading from his latest book of poetry, All That Beauty.