HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the December edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with Monica Prince and Carole Boston Weatherford, hosted by Laura Shovan. Join us at the Columbia Art Center on Tuesday, December 12th at 7 p.m., at 6100 Foreland Garth, Columbia, MD 21045. Please spread the word— bring your friends, family and students! Light refreshments will be served and books by the readers available for sale.

An open mic follows the featured authors and we encourage you to participate. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time, about two poems. Sign up when you arrive, or in advance by calling the Columbia Arts Center at (410)-730-0075.

Below, get to know Monica and Carole!

Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?

Monica: My mother shows up the most in my work. My first published choreopoem, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, is about and for my mother. Something about all the lessons I’ve absorbed from her makes me want to feature her in my writing. So many of my poems feature her because I have a romanticized idea of what it means to be a Black mother from her. She’s the strongest woman I know. I want her legacy to live after her.

Carole: Billie Holiday, my muse.

Where is your favorite place to write?

Monica: I love writing in public— bars, restaurants, intermissions during plays, in line at the bank. The frenzied nature of being in public, possibly observed, and not having that much time to get something down pushes my creativity. Most of the poems in Roadmap were written while I waited for friends to meet me at a bar, between workshops and events during a writing residency, and during commercial breaks while watching TV with my mom. I joke with my students that I’ve made my career off 7-13 minute stretches of poetry, and it’s not wrong.

Carole: Planes and trains.

Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?

Monica: The only thing I do every time I write is I try to find a black pen. I hate the color blue, despite it being my power color, so I can’t get good work done with a blue pen. I don’t have many rituals because I only write when I can get the time, which is infrequent these days.

Carole: No.

Who always gets a first read?

Monica: Typically, my husband Rob gets to hear my work first, but mostly because he’s almost always there while I’m composing work. Other than that, it’s whoever is present when I finish a draft. I’m unafraid of showing off my terrible drafts immediately because I’m a trained slam poet who has been workshopping poems on stage for over a decade. I’m not very precious about my work in that way. I want folks to see how pieces change over time.

Carole: My agent.

What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?

Monica: Ntozake Shange’s For colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. I read that book at least twice a year every year because I teach it. But it’s also the source of my original inspiration for writing choreopoems. I’d also say Meaty by Samantha Irby. I love reading and listening to it, it’s awesome in both versions. I’ve read that at least three times.

Carole: Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje.

What is the most memorable reading you have attended?

Monica: At one of my first AWP conferences, I think it was in Minneapolis in 2015, I attended a Cave Canem reading. It was one of those things that was scheduled before the conference really started. I met all these fellows whose work I’d been following for years. Jericho Brown read from what would later become the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, The Tradition, and I found myself sobbing. There was something about being surrounded by Black poets after another one of our siblings was murdered for nothing that made me feel at home, even if I wasn’t a fellow myself. I was three months from graduating with my MFA and I had been considering never writing again— nothing felt good about my work, especially after my thesis defense left me a little raw and stinging. But that reading saved me; that community saved me. I’m grateful for them.

Carole: Poet Ntozake Shange and saxophonist Oliver Lake at DC Space in the late 1970s or early 1980s.