The 20 poetic monologues making up Ntozake Shange’s seminal work, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, have been performed live from Berkeley to Broadway’s Booth Theatre, and interpreted on screen by the likes of Tessa Thompson, Thandiwe Newton, Kimberly Elise, and Kerry Washington. Let us gather to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its print adaptation!

Expect a celebratory, participant-led discussion exploring the impact of for colored girls… when it was written, its legacy, and what it continues to mean to readers in 2026, whether they are coming to it for the first time or the fiftieth.

A conversation exploring adoptee experience and the ways creative expression helps reclaim identity and reshape cultural narratives.

The AAOM Speaker Series is part of a grassroots fundraising campaign in support of adoptee activism, community building, educational and legislative outreach.

I will be reading at this special open mic, which is being held in collaboration with Also Known As, and co-facilitated by Jae Carelli and Ryan Jafar Artes.

The Adoptee Voices Open Mic was created to celebrate and uplift adoptee artists by giving the adoptee community a space to be seen, heard, and celebrated through creative expression.

This event invites us to come together, showcase our talents, and honor National Adoption Awareness Month through the voices that define us.

This series brings together poets and musicians to take the stage together, in conversation. I am honored to be in community with these artists across mediums, in a place that feels like a second home for me.

I am thrilled to gather Ryan Jafar Artes, Rob Arnold & Molly Gaudry at this centering—and celebration—of the voices of adopted people, both in-person at Brooklyn Poets and livestreamed via Zoom. Proceeds from this event will support adoptee creatives, as well as Adoptees for Family Preservation, a nonprofit organization committed to raising awareness of adoption industry practices. This event will also be a celebration of my debut collection, Performance Anxiety, out now from Black Sunflowers Poetry Press. Books will be available for sale and signing.

The Adoptee Film Fest is proud to champion Adoptee filmmakers who have created films centering and exploring the Adoptee identity and experience, all of which the selections embody.

Please join us for a screening of the film, Because She’s Adopted, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker and subject Kristal Parke, which I will moderate.

Wheel of Fortune premieres on NBC. Bill Gates launches Microsoft. Fugitive Patty Hearst is captured. Saigon falls. It is 1975, and four women write four novels challenging freedom, fear, and expectations of the feminine. But whose expectations? That is just one of the questions we’ll explore in our discussions of these four novels, still fierce at 50.

I was thrilled to be perform alongside powerhouse poets Rachel Zucker and Tom Thompson at the legendary KGB Bar, named the best literary venue in New York City by New York Magazine and the Village Voice.

Curated and emceed by poet, scholar, and activist Dr. Darius Phelps, the Embracing Every Hue reading series honors the bold language, deep emotion, and collective joy of its poets on and off the page.

Created and hosted by Krystal Marie Orwig and Hope Elizabeth Kidd, Must Love Memoir is a monthly NYC-based reading series devoted to storytelling and community.

Sponsored by Also-Known-As, this adoptee only event features adoptee creatives expressing their identity and experiences through their chosen craft, with insights on personal storytelling, technique, and self-exploration.

In this generative workshop sponsored by the Poetry Society of New York, we’ll look at poets who have closed the gap between speaker/poet and subject, and experiment with forms that lend themselves to connection across metaphysical time and space.

Mark Twain once said, “Fact is stranger than fiction, but that is because Fiction is obligated to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” But what happens when fiction announces itself as rooted in fact? Inside what possibilities does it deposit the reader? We will explore these and other questions in this Center for Fiction reading group.

Celebrating contributors to Emerson College’s literary magazines, Redivider and Page Turner, alongside Emerson’s Porsha Olayiwola. I will be reading my Summer 2024 Redivider submission, Fresh Air, as well as work from my forthcoming chapbook, Performance Anxiety (spring 2025).

Richmond Poetry Fest hosted by the Visual Arts Center of Richmond is an event co-created by VisArts staff and a group of former and current writers-in-residence! A celebration of poetry and community, Richmond Poetry Fest will include readings, workshops, activities for poets and artists of all ages, and vendors.

In this adoptee only workshop, participants will explore questions around what it means to be “estranged” within the context of the adoptee experience, and discuss the unique challenges of writing through and about absence.

Join poets, makers, and vendors from across the city at this unique event where art, poetry, and holiday magic come together. I will be one of a group of typewriter poets creating one-of-a-kind, personalized poems onsite. There will also be performances by Dorothea Lasky and Terrance Hayes.

Acclaimed poet Nathan McClain will be joined by NYC-area poets for an intimate night of poetry, exploring what it means to be Black and write poems in which the natural world appears, creating worlds of wonder, curiosity, and attentiveness. This event is presented in partnership with the Bowery Poetry Club.

Join Haley Radke and I as we interview Jenny Heijun Wills, author of the essay collection Everything and Nothing At All (Penguin Random House Canada 2024), and the memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. (Penguin Random House 2019).

Join members and guests of the Harlem Literary Society for a discussion of Master Slave Husband Wife the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Ellen and William Craft written by Ilyon Woo. This discussion, moderated by Literary Society member, Sullivan Summer, will take place at The New School.

Readings from Black writers across the diaspora, celebrating the work of Torch Literary Arts, an organization devoted to publishing and promoting creative writing by Black women.

Featured readings from four, New York City-based women poets at the Inspired Word NYC’s Poetry Hour at Brooklyn Music Kitchen.