Join us for the return of the SILO CITY READING SERIES featuring poetry from Vievee Francis & Porsha Olayiwola, a performance by C4W2 (Chango4 & way2wavybaby), and a film produced by poet Mark Nowak.
Tickets Available Monday, August 2, 2021 @ 10:00 a.m.
Doors at 7:00 p.m. | Reading begins at 7:30 p.m.
Books available for purchase from Fitz Books online & at the event.
- Advance tickets (with assertion of COVID-19 vaccination) required
- Capacity is limited to 50 attendees
- Temperature checks will be conducted upon arrival
- CDC & NY State guidelines will be followed
If & when all free tickets are claimed, you can add your name to the waitlist here!
Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, Northwestern University Press, 2016) and Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009, she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She is the recipient of the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.
JBLC 2021 Poetry Fellow Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who now resides in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator, and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the artistic director at MassLEAP , a literary youth organization. Olayiwola is an MFA Candidate at Emerson College. Porsha Olayiwola is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too forthcoming with Button Poetry and is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston.
Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down (a New York Times “Editor’s Choice”), Coal Mountain Elementary (which Howard Zinn called “a stunning educational tool”), and Social Poetics, all from Coffee House Press. He recently edited Coronavirus Haiku, an anthology of haiku written in his workshops by “frontline workers” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nowak is a Guggenheim, Lannan, and Creative Capital fellow. A native of Buffalo, he is the founding director of the Worker Writers School.
Buffalo’s own Chango4 & way2wavybaby combine forces to take on the world under the stitched acronym “C4W2”. As two individual artists with ranging perspectives, when this duo creatively unites, they cover double the unexplored territory. Chango & Wavy’s desire to continually elevate their sonic identity has garnered respect from their peers in a short amount of time. Through multiple forms of expression, C4W2 puts their most authentic selves out there & that energy is guaranteed to take you out of this world.