Join Blair and Rofhiwa Book Café for a celebration of National Poetry Month with a virtual reading by poets L. Teresa Church, Cynthia Manick, and L. Lamar Wilson, on Thursday, April 28 at 6:30 p.m. EST. Rofhiwa will be taking book orders online at rofhiwabooks.com and will be doing some giveaways - winners to be selected the night of the event.
Register here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/a-virtual-poetry-reading/register
About Rofhiwa Book Café:
Rofhiwa is a Black and queer owned Book Café recently opened in Durham NC. We offer a hand-selected collection of classic and contemporary books by Black writers across the globe, and a thoughtful selection of coffees sourced through Black roasters. Rofhiwa strives to reflect the expansiveness of the black imagination. We value books as repositories for collective knowledge. Rofhiwa values accessibility, we invite readers young and old to satisfy their curiosity, to wander and meet new titles or return to old favorites. https://rofhiwabooks.com
About Blair:
Blair is a nonprofit press based in Durham, NC. Blair’s mission is to make accessible voices that have been traditionally underrepresented by mainstream publishing. In addition to publishing, Blair's mission includes outreach, educational programs, and audience development, in order to bring new authors to new audiences.
About the poets:
Dr. L.Teresa Church penned her first poem at the age of sixteen and has been a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective since 1995. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Simply Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Solo Café, Nocturnes: (re)view of the Literary Arts, African American Review, North Carolina Literary Review, her chapbooks Hand-Me-Down Calicos and Beyond the Water Dance, One window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku, and All the Songs We Sing: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. She serves as membership chairperson and archivist for the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective.
Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016) and editor of Soul Sister Revue: A Poetry Compilation (Jamii Publishing, 2019) and The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Publishing, forthcoming 2021). Manick is Founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue and her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Callaloo, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently serves on the board of the International Women’s Writing Guild and the editorial board of Alice James Books.
L. Lamar Wilson’s documentary poetics has been featured in two poetry collections, a stage production, and a film. Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press, 2013) was a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award. Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014) received a 2015 American Library Association “Over the Rainbow” Commendation. The Gospel Truth, a musical adaptation of Sacrilegion, was performed in Miami and Tallahassee, Fla., in 2014 and 2017, the latter time with a troupe that honors artists with cognitive and physical differences. The Changing Same, a POV Shorts collaboration with Rada Film Group that debuted in 2019 on PBS, won a special jury prize at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival. Wilson’s work centers the voices and experiences of black and brown folk thriving in the rural South despite relentless, centuries-long homegrown terrorism. Wilson, a Florida A&M alumnus, has received fellowships from the Cave Canem, Ragdale, and Hurston-Wright foundations, among others, and holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and a doctorate in African American and multiethnic American poetics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wilson teaches at Wake Forest University and the Mississippi University for Women.