Saturday, July 11^th, 2026 – 4 to 7 pm

City Arts Salon, 5838 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19144

Painting in the Dark interrogates the hideousness of war, addiction, and delusion with the consolation concluding poet John Lavin’s final poem, –but that’s all we have is each other. Illustrators Gregorio Torres, III and Janelle Robinson have joined Lavin in mapping the extreme pain and pleasure inherent in this collection’s narrative arc: a journey from darkness to light. Just such solidarity is engrained in this book’s search within the darkness imposed  by a king’s tyranny (“Goya Under House Arrest”) and elaborated in erotic euphoria, colonial oppression, exile, and erasure. John Lavin was Gregorio’s drama teacher and ten years after Greg’s graduation Lavin attended an exhibition of Torres and his partner, Janelle Robinson’s art in New York (2023) where they began the conversation that inspired this collection.  Event will combine reading from Collection of Poems, Musical Performance and Reflection.