Virtual Poetry Reading: M. Nzadi Keita, Aaren Perry, Lamont B. Steptoe

Friday February 25, 2022 – 7pm

Registration Required – use this link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZElfuGurTIvHdEhuhKG-RhSJuelsiJtkkw0

M. Nzadi Keita is the author of Brief Evidence of Heaven: Poems from the life of Anna Murray Douglass. That book, a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Prize, is cited by David Blight in his prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Migration Letters, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2023, will feature poems that center Keita’s perspectives as a first-generation northerner. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications. She has received Leeway Foundation grants and a Pew Fellowship for poetry.  Keita is a Professor of English at Ursinus College, where she teaches creative writing, American literature, and Africana Studies.

Aaren Perry’s new book is Shipping and Receiving, published by Moonstone. Bilingual with an MFA from Vermont College, he recently edited a forthcoming 2022 collection of new poems by lamont b. steptoe. He co-edited with Dr. James Villarreal, Under Lock and Key: 100 Poems From Death Row, by Anthony Reid, out this month on Amazon. Perry runs Yeatts Perry Consulting, grants and donor management for health equity and social change nonprofits. Contact him for a two-book special: “Shipping and Receiving (Moonstone) and Open Fire (Whirlwind Press) mindfulpoetics@gmail.com includes shipping.

Lamont B. Steptoe is an award-winning poet, born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Steptoe is a Vietnam veteran, photographer and founder of Whirlwind Press.  He has published sixteen collections of poems and is winner of an American Book Award, a Pew fellow in the Arts, induction into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent by the Gwendolyn Brooks Center in Chicago, and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts awards. Steptoe’s work appears in over one hundred anthologies, the most recent being Waging Peace in Vietnam. Hismost recent titles are Crowns & Halos, Oracular Rumblings & Stilt Walking, Meditations in Congo Square and Beyond the White Stone Lions.

Open Reading follows