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Wilde Readers of January: Yvette Neisser & Pantea Tofangchi
UPDATED: This January session of the Wilde Reading Series, featuring Yvette Neisser and Pantea Tofangchi, has been re-scheduled for the evening of Tuesday, January 30th at 7 p.m.
HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the January edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with Yvette Neisser and Pantea Tofangchi, hosted by Linda Joy Burke. Join us at the Columbia Art Center on Tuesday, January 30th 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 Yvette and Pantea!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
Yvette: My father. He died young, so I have written many poems processing his loss.
Pantea: Me and my family.
Where is your favorite place to write?
Yvette: In my bedroom, before dawn.
Pantea: My desk.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
Yvette: Nothing consistent, though I often write first thing when I wake up, with a cup of tea.
Pantea: I pick a book of poems and read a few poems and then write! Or look at paintings.
Who always gets a first read?
Yvette: Depends on the poem, the subject. If I’m excited about a first draft, I share it with someone who I think would appreciate it–this might be my partner, a good friend, a fellow poet, or my mom.
Pantea: My husband.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
Yvette: I’m not sure if I’ve read anything more than twice. Certainly I’ve read several of Pablo Neruda’s works at least twice: Twenty Love Poems, The Captain’s Verses, and Heights of Macchu Picchu, and will probably read them again. I also just read Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain for a second time and would read it again.
Pantea: The Little Prince. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Baron in the Trees. Sharabe Khaam (The Raw Wine). Another Birth (a collection of poems by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad).
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
Yvette: The most magical for me were the Dodge Poetry Festival readings (in NJ) that I attended as a young poet— especially Lucille Clifton, who read in the early morning in a small cabin, with people seated all over the floor.
Pantea: Ivy Book Store, Judith Krummeck reading from her book in conversation with Dan Rodricks.
• Yvette Neisser is the author of two poetry collections, Iron Into Flower (2022) and Grip (2011 Gival Press Poetry Award). Her translations from Spanish include South Pole/Polo Sur by María Teresa Ogliastri and Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems by Luis Alberto Ambroggio.
Founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network, she has taught writing at The George Washington University, The Writer’s Center, and elsewhere. By day, she works in international development. You can find her online at yvetteneisser.net.
• Pantea Amin Tofangchi is an Iranian-American poet, writer, and graphic designer. She writes poems (in English), essays, stories and plays (mostly in Persian). Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Little Patuxent Review, Welter, Atlanta Review—in which she won the International Merit Award—and other journals. She was selected as a finalist for The National Poetry Series’ 2016 and Georgia Poetry Prize 2018. Her latest book, Glazed With War, is a poetic memoir about growing up in Iran.
You can learn more about Pantea’s writing at panteatofangchi.com, and find her graphic design portfolio at panteaat.myportfolio.com.
Wilde Readers of December: Monica Prince & Carole Boston Weatherford
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.
• Monica Prince, one of the foremost choreopoem experts in the country, teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem, How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem, Instructions for Temporary Survival, and Letters from the Other Woman.
Keep up with her at www.monicaprince.com; @poetic_moni at Instagram and Twitter (she’s not calling it X); and @MonicaPrinceChoreopoet on Facebook.
• Carole Boston Weatherford is a two-time NAACP Image Award winner and the author of Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre, which won the Coretta Scott King Author and Illustrator Awards, a Caldecott Honor, and a Sibert Honor. She is also the author of the Newbery Honor book Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom and the Caldecott Honor books Freedom in Congo Square; Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement; and Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, as well as the Coretta Scott King Medal book Standing in the Need of Prayer. Born in Baltimore, Weatherford now teaches at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina.
Find her online at cbweatherford.com; on X as @poetweatherford; @carole.weatherford on Facebook; and @caroleweatherford on Instagram.
Wilde Readers of November: Heidi Mordhorst & Victoria Adams-Kennedy
HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the November edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with Heidi Mordhorst and Victoria Adams-Kennedy, hosted by Ann Bracken. Join us at the Columbia Art Center on Tuesday, November 14th 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 Heidi and Victoria!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
Heidi: They show up often, my mom and my dad. They do not mean to, but they do.
Victoria: It’s not just one; It’s my mother and her seven sisters. I learned so much from watching them and eavesdropping on their conversations. Their distinct personalities make them perfect subjects.
Where is your favorite place to write?
Heidi: I have a comfy sofa in a pleasant room in our new 1925 house in East Silver Spring.
Victoria: The Last Resort Artist Retreat in Baltimore. It’s a serene environment with beautiful artwork.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
Heidi: Only the one, and it’s not exactly intentional or consistent: as I’m waking, or as I’m brushing my teeth, or as I’m shampooing, or as I’m pointing a hot noisy hairdryer at my head, something will come to me. Most recently a poem title: A Revision Is Required.
Victoria: I’m inspired by character traits that are most often attributed to members of my family or my childhood community. There were lots of colorful characters in my neighborhood. I draft characters who are composites of those people and their circumstances. Then the story comes and I sit down to write.
Who always gets a first read?
Heidi: Most often the trusted members of my critique group. They are fans, but they ask me hard questions as well, which generally carry the message, “You have made this way more complicated than it needs to be.”
Victoria: One of my aunts or a member of Zora’s Den, my writers’ group I founded in 2017.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
Heidi: Hmmmm. I rarely pick up an adult title more than once (although there are poems I never get tired of)—but there are many books written for young readers that I return to again and again. A recent favorite is GREEN ON GREEN by Dianne White, illustrated by Felicita Sala.
Victoria: The first to come to mind is Indigo by Beverly Jenkins. It is one of many.
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
Heidi: I’m a relative newbie to public readings. I haven’t been to many live readings and I’ve read at very few! I did have a memorable time hearing Lucille Clifton read at the Dodge Poetry Festival one year—but which year?
Victoria: A reading by Terry McMillan at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore City. She was engaging through her work and her commentary. And she had command of the room with humor and insight.
• Heidi Mordhorst is the author of two collections of poetry for young readers and contributions to
journals and anthologies for both adults and children, most recently Poetry by Chance and Dear
Human on the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the US. She taught in public schools for
35 years and recently served on the NCTE Excellence in Poetry Award Committee. She now offers
multi-arts poetry programming for young writers through WHISPERshout Writing Workshop.
Heidi can be found online at her blog, my juicy little universe, on Facebook and Bluesky, and at the homepage of her youth writing workshop, WHISPERshout.
• Victoria Adams-Kennedy writes about the complexities of Black Love. Her first novel, Sometimes
Love, was published in 2017 by Brown Girls Books. She is the founder of Zora’s Den, a group for
black women writers for which she co-edited The Fire Inside, Volumes I & II. Victoria holds an MFA
in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore. Her work has appeared in
midnight & indigo and TORCH Literary Arts.
Victoria can be reached at Facebook or Instagram, both under the account @victoriaadamskennedy.
Announcing: the Howard County Poet Laureate!
UPDATED 1/10/2024: The Poet Laureate submission deadline has been extended to Monday, January 22, 2024.
HoCoPoLitSo is excited to announce the establishment of the first-ever position of Howard County Poet Laureate, created in partnership with the Howard County Arts Council to elevate poetry in the consciousness of Howard County residents and to join in celebrating the literary arts— now open to eligible applicants residing in Howard County!
The Poet Laureate is an honorary two-year position, in service to the community, formally appointed by the County Executive based on a recommendation made by an artistic and community panel selection process coordinated by HoCoPoLitSo.
During their term, the Poet Laureate acts as an advocate for poetry, literature, and the arts and contributes to Howard County’s poetic and literary legacy through public readings and participation in civic events. The next—and first!—Poet Laureate will serve from April 2024 through March 2026 and will receive a stipend of $5,000 per year of service, and up to $500 per year for reimbursable expenses related to the Poet Laureate’s activities.
The Howard County Poet Laureate Program is a partnership between Howard County Poetry & Literature Society with the Office of County Executive Calvin Ball and the Howard County Arts Council. To learn more about the program please visit the HCAC program landing page here or review the program guidelines available therein.
Eligible candidates may apply now by clicking HERE! Deadline for submissions is January 9, 2024. UPDATED: deadline for submissions has been extended to Monday, January 22, 2024.
Wilde Readers of October: Odessa Rose & Deborah Kalb
HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the October edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with Odessa Rose and Deborah Kalb, hosted by Linda Joy Burke. Join us at the Columbia Art Center on Tuesday, October 10th 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 Odessa and Deborah!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
Odessa: Until my latest novel, “Kizmic’s Journey”, no one in my life has ever showed up in my books. In “Kizmic’s Journey,” I wrote about my family’s church, so I had characters that were based on them in the book, in particular my uncle who was the Bishop of our church until his death.
Deborah: Various versions of myself.
Where is your favorite place to write?
Odessa: My favorite place to write is in my home office. My family are in the house with me and I like being close to them. My husband lets me bounce ideas off him. My daughter often comes in my office and tells me about her stop motion scripts or films that she is working on. My sons stop in to give me hugs and kisses. I know I can probably get more done if I worked some place else, but I am most creative when I’m home.
Deborah: My home office, at my desktop computer.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
Odessa: Research is my only pre-writing ritual. I love to research because I love learning new things. I like discovering things about my characters and the many themes that run through my novels.
Deborah: Taking long walks and contemplating what my characters might do next.
Who always gets a first read?
Odessa: My husband always gets the first read. Often times I wake him up in the middle of the night to discuss something going right or wrong with the book. So, he deserves the first read.
Deborah: A few of my family members and a couple of close friends.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
Odessa: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” is a book I’ve read over and over and over again. I love Morrison’s writing. I love the imagery in “Song of Solomon.”
Deborah: The Pursuit of Alice Thrift by Elinor Lipman.
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
Odessa: The most memorable reading I’ve attended is when Terry McMillan came to Morgan State University when she was on tour for “Waiting To Exhale.” I had just had an operation and was supposed to stay in bed, but when I learned that Terry McMillan was coming to town, I got up and went. I somehow forgot my book, but she signed my ticket, and I got a picture of her with my friend. I will never forget that day.
Deborah: Various book events featuring my father, Marvin Kalb, who is 93 and still writing books.
• Odessa Rose received her B.A. in English from Coppin State University and her M.A. in Literature from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is the author of Water In A Broken Glass, which was her first novel. This intriguing story captured the #6 spot on the On-Demand Best Seller list, received the Just About Books Annual Book Award, is ranked #17 on Accredited Online Colleges’ 20 Essential Novels For African-American Women list, was recorded for the Maryland School for the Blind, is included in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature, Ethnic American Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students, and Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction.
In 2018, Water In A Broken Glass was adapted into an award-winning feature film called Water In A Broken Glass. Her second novel, In the Mirror received the African American Expo Award for Fiction. Rose is a member of the Black Writers Guild of Maryland. She is also the co-creator of the television magazine, This Is Baltimore, Too. She resides in her hometown of Baltimore with her husband and three children. You can find Odessa and links to all her social media pages at odessarose.com.
• Deborah Kalb is a freelance writer and editor. She spent about two decades working as a journalist in Washington, D.C., for news organizations including Gannett News Service, Congressional Quarterly, U.S. News & World Report, and The Hill, mostly covering Congress and politics. Her book blog, Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, which she started in 2012, features hundreds of interviews she has conducted with a wide variety of authors.
She is the author of the forthcoming novel Off to Join the Circus (Apprentice House, 2023), as well as three novels for kids, Thomas Jefferson and the Return of the Magic Hat (Schiffer, 2020), John Adams and the Magic Bobblehead (Schiffer, 2018), and George Washington and the Magic Hat (Schiffer, 2016) — and she’s the co-author, with her father, Marvin Kalb, of Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama (Brookings, 2011). She is the author/updater of Elections A to Z, 5th edition (CQ Press/SAGE, 2022), the editor of the two-volume reference book, Guide to U.S. Elections, 7th edition (CQ Press/SAGE, 2016), the co-author of The Presidents, First Ladies, and Vice Presidents (CQ Press, 2009), and the co-editor of State of the Union: Presidential Rhetoric from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush (CQ Press, 2007), and has contributed updates to a variety of other CQ Press books on politics and government.
Deborah can be found online at deborahkalb.com and on Twitter @deborahkalb, Instagram @deborahskalb, and on Facebook.
Freedom to Read Roundtable
Would you like to support the essential right to read?
Then join HoCoPoLitSo for our 2023 Lucille Clifton Reading Series offering: the upcoming Freedom to Read Roundtable, presented in partnership with Howard County Library System (HCLS).
Come to the Miller Branch at 1:30 p.m. for a thoughtful discussion and readings by Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri and distinguished poet and publisher Truth Thomas, then stay at 2:30 p.m. to watch and participate in the virtual roundtable panel discussion with National Book Award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter James McBride, Washington Post satirist and author Alexandra Petri, renowned historian and author Dr. Richard Bell, and American Library Association President Emily Drabinski.
All in-person attendees receive a complimentary copy of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, the newest book from James McBride. Light refreshments will be served.
📅 Sunday, October 15
🕜 1:30 p.m. (in-person) and 2:30 p.m. (virtual)
📍 Miller Branch and Online
To register for the in-person event: bit.ly/FreedomToRead-InPerson
To register for the virtual event: bit.ly/FreedomToRead-Virtual
A Newark Childhood
Saturday September 30th at 2 p.m., please join HoCoPoLitSo Board Member David Hugo Barrett at the Miller Branch of the Howard County Library for a reading from his book “A Newark Childhood” and for a conversation between father and son about the memoir and the insights born of growing up in the fifties and sixties in Newark, New Jersey. Find a synopsis and excerpt at www.davidhugobarrett.com.
The 2023 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize
Held annually in loving memory of HoCoPoLitSo’s co-founder, the 2023 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize is now open to all entrants! Whether you are a life-time poet or have never written a line before, we invite you to share with us whatever moves you to poetry.
The author of the poem selected for first place will be awarded a cash prize of $500, celebrated on HoCoPoLitSo’s website, social media, and in our annual report— and have their winning poem published in The Little Patuxent Review and right here on HoCoPoLitSo’s front page.
To enter, click here, or visit the contest’s page to learn more or to read past winners’ poems. A reading fee of $10 per entrant supports a panel of fair and balanced judges.
The 2023 Bauder Lecture, featuring Nadia Owusu & Tope Folarin
This Thursday, September 21, 2023, HoCoPoLitSo proudly presents in partnership with Howard Community College and the Howard County Library System, the 2023 installment of the Bauder Lecture Series, featuring Nadia Owusu, author of “Aftershocks“, hosted by Tope Folarin, author of “A Particular Kind of Black Man“.
Join us for this free and public event, in person at the Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center on the HCC campus, or online streamed live via Vimeo at this link. The day’s events begin with a reading and keynote at 12:30 p.m., followed by a short reception and second reading at 6:00 p.m. Signed books will be available for purchase from HoCoPoLitSo to in-person attendees following both presentations.
The Bauder Lecture Series is made possible by a generous grant from Dr. Lillian Bauder, a community leader and Columbia resident. HoCoPoLitSo is a private nonprofit 501(c)(3) cultural arts organization designed to enlarge the audience for contemporary poetry and literature and celebrate culturally diverse literary heritages. HoCoPoLitSo receives funding from the Maryland State Arts Council, the Howard County Art Council through a grant from Howard County government, Community Foundation of Howard County, Dr. Lilian Bauder, the Reis Foundation, and from individual contributors like you.
For more information, visit the Horowitz Center event page available here— and be sure to check back right here for more literary events coming soon from HoCoPoLitSo.
let there be lit.
Wilde Readers of September: Adina Ferguson & Edward Belfar
HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the September edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with Adina Ferguson and Edward Belfar, hosted by Ann Bracken. Join us at the Columbia Art Center on Tuesday, September 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 Adina and Edward!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
Adina: I’d have to say my Mom shows up in my work a lot (more). Whether it’s a paragraph or whole essay, Connie is getting her shine (LOL). I’m often writing about growing into womanhood and my mom has definitely had an influence in that area. And of late, my therapist has become a character in my work. So much so that she’ll slide in a “It’s fine. You can write about me in your next story” when we have a “heavy” session and I want to quit her.
Edward: I am primarily a fiction writer, and all my characters are composites, drawn from various sources, including direct experience, things I heard about second- or third-hand, my reading of fiction and nonfiction, and my imagination. There is never a one-to-one correspondence in my fiction, such that Character X equals Real Person Y. The closest I might come to that is imagining how someone like Real Person Y might respond to a situation faced by Character X, but when I do that, I often find that Character X surprises me in a way that Real Person Y probably would not.
Where is your favorite place to write?
Adina: The Purple Room aka my home office/guestroom is my writing sanctuary. I was very intentional with the artwork I put on the walls, the photos I have on the bookshelf, my goal board, the color scheme.
Edward: I have made part of our basement into an office, in which I have a desktop, a printer, and many reference books. I do most of my drafting there. I like to edit on paper, though, and I often do that at the dining room table.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
Adina: Before I can get in a good writing groove, I like to listen to one of my Spotify playlists of R&B songs and then I’ll switch to YouTube to watch a few Jodeci videos. I’m a big 90s/2000s R&B fan. And so I pretty much have a little mini concert before I finally get down to business (professional procrastinator here). All the while there’s a candle burning in the background. I like tapping into a few senses first.
Edward: I do not.
Who always gets a first read?
Adina: I’ll drop a message in the group chat with my best friends, Davie and Marquetta. But the way everyone’s lives are set up, it comes down to whichever of them is available. We went to the same arts high school and were in the same department. So, I value their feedback as fellow writers who happen to be my sisters for life.
Edward: My wife Kathleen always gets a first read. Without her support and encouragement, I doubt that I would have been able to persevere through all the rejection, disappointment, and frustration to publish two books. At the same time, she is an astute critic and will not hesitate to tell me if she finds a false note in something I have written.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
Edward: Many books fit that description. One that comes readily to mind, because it is both eerily prescient and hilarious, is Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. It was very much on my mind when I was writing my novel A Very Innocent Man.
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
Adina: Oooh, that’s a great question! I can’t narrow it down to one event but I will say I always have a great time when I attend Zora’s Den’s “In Our Own Words” Reading series in Baltimore. There’s an indescribable feeling when you hear Black women share their lives with you. The voices, styles, experiences are so eclectic. I’m always finding new writers to fangirl over and honestly, it’s just a whole vibe of sistahood!
Edward: It is hard to pick one, as I have attended many memorable readings, both in person and online. One that does stand out in my mind, though, even after many years, was given by the late Amiri Baraka when I was in graduate school at SUNY/Stony Brook. He was as great a performer as he was a poet. Without singing a note, he made an instrument of his voice and transformed the poems that he read into music. Until that night, I don’t think I had realized the power of the spoken word.
• Adina Ferguson is a Pushcart Prize nominated essayist, humorist, content writer and proud DC native. Her work centers around being black and woman and a single 30-something navigating life with therapy, old school TV, friends and family. She is the author of the essay collection, I Don’t Want to Be Your Bridesmaid, and has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, The Fire Inside Volume II, Midnight & Indigo, Very Smart Brothas, Defenestration, and more. Adina currently resides in Columbia, MD with her french bulldog, Kobi. You can find Adina at adinathewriter.com, on Instagram @adinathewriter or on the couch watching Good Times reruns.
• Edward Belfar is the author of two books of fiction. His novel A Very Innocent Man was published by Flexible Press in 2023. Wanderers, a collection of short stories, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2012. His fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Shenandoah, The Baltimore Review, Potpourri, Confrontation, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Tampa Review. He lives with his wife in Maryland and can be reached through his website at edwardbelfar.com.
HoCoPoLitSo 