The Devil and the Dictionary is a lecture that offers a history of reading and a diasporic story of how a vocabulary travels through the bellies of empire(s). It is about fear, disgust, and curiosity. And blackberries. The lecture centers on the reading and writing practices of Malcolm X and Sylvia Plath, who Victor reads from various vantage points—as a child growing up in postcolonial India, as a new immigrant in the US in the aftermath of 9/11, and in the present, where she lives few miles from Malcolm X’s childhood home in Michigan.

Grounded in her research and memoiristic explorations from her upcoming book Kin: Essays on Reckless Devotion, The Devil and the Dictionary is concerned with whiteness as a product of the American canon, and aims to imagine the complicated inheritances of immigrant poets of color in the United States.

Divya Victor (2025 Creative Capital Awardee) is a Tamil-American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of Curb, which won the PEN Open Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award for Kin, her forthcoming collection of essays from Graywolf. She is also the author of Kith, Natural Subjects, Things to Do with your Mouth, and other books.