A signal voice in boosting and articulating Black aesthetics and cultural theory over the last two decades – via much-read books including In the Break (2003), The Undercommons (2013) and Black and Blur (2017) – Moten is also a walking testament to stylistic freedom. This year found the 2020 MacArthur genius-grant awardee taking time out from lecturing on performance studies at NYU (as well as his fellowship at Harvard and other-coast gig at UC Riverside) to lecture on subjects including the poetics of W.E.B. Du Bois and to participate in the Harvard conference ‘Jews and Black Theory: Conceptualizing Otherness’. (In a report on the latter, his performance-inflected keynote was described as a talk that ‘defies summarizing’.) But Moten, who has historically collaborated with artists such as Wu Tsang, is himself as much a creative maker as a parser of ideas. In 2024, in addition to giving onstage poetry readings (he’s now published ten books of verse), he released and gigged the blacksmiths, the flowers, his second album alongside jazz rhythm section Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, with Moten – who else – taking care of the words.