Join us virtually on Sunday, March 7, 2021 from 6-8pm for the next reading by the First Person Plural Reading Series featuring Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Jennine Capó Crucet, Koritha Mitchell, Keya Mitra, and Rhonda Welsh and hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. This reading promises to be an extraordinary night full of remarkable poetry, prose, and scholarship. Admission is free. Zoom login information will be shared prior to the event. Please RSVP here.
More about the readers:
A 2019 inductee into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, former high school creative writing teacher Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project in 1995 to bring the power of poetry and literary self-expression to youth in Detroit classrooms and communities. Blackhawk’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and online at Poetry Daily, The Collagist, Interim, ONE, Verse Daily and elsewhere. Awards for poetry include seven Pushcart nominations, the Foley Poetry Award, and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod International. She was twice named Michigan Creative Writing Teacher of the Year by the Michigan Youth Arts Festival and is a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow. Her five full-length poetry collections include Escape Artist (BkMk Press, 2003), selected by Molly Peacock for the John Ciardi Prize, and The Light Between (Wayne State University Press, 2012). Her first book body & field (Michigan State University Press, 1999) was a finalist for the Larry Levis, Four Way Books Intro and New Issues Awards, among others. One Less River (Mayapple Press, 2019) was on two best-seller lists in October 2019 and was named a 2019 BEST INDIE POETRY title by Kirkus Reviews. Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk holds a B.A. from Antioch College and a Ph.D. and an Honorary Doctorate from Oakland University. In 1992-1993, she received a Teacher-Scholar sabbatical award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the life and work of Emily Dickinson and has published poems, essays, and encyclopedia entries on the poet. Other areas of inspiration include bird watching, mythology, and visual art and artists. She is currently working on a collection of poems entitled Maumee, Maumee memorializing the life and work of her beloved partner, Toledo artist Neil Frankenhauser (1939-2019).
Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of Make Your Home Among Strangers, winner of the International Latino Book Award and cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, the Guardian, and the Miami Herald; and of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the John Gardner Book Prize. A Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times and a recipient of an O. Henry Prize, she is currently an associate professor at the University of Nebraska. Her essay collection, My Time Among the Whites, was published by Picador in September 2019.
Koritha Mitchell is an award-winning author, cultural critic, and associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Her first book, Living with Lynching, won awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her second monograph, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture, appeared in August 2020 and was named a Best Book of 2020 by Ms. Magazine. She is also editor of the Broadview Edition of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy, and her scholarly articles include “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie,” published by American Quarterly, and “Love in Action,” which appeared in Callaloo and draws parallels between lynching and violence against LGBTQ communities. Her commentary has appeared in outlets such as CNN, Good Morning America, The Huffington Post, NBC News, PBS Newshour, and NPR’s Morning Edition. On Twitter, she’s @ProfKori.
Keya Mitra is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at Pacific University, where she received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. Her short story collection has been a finalist for the 2020 Dzanc Books’ Diverse Voices Prize, the Bakeless Prize, the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and a semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her fiction was recognized under “Other Distinguished Stories” in Best American Short Stories 2018 and has appeared in the Bennington Review, The Kenyon Review, Arts and Letters, The Bellevue Literary Review, Moss, The Southwest Review, Slush Pile, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, Confrontation, Aster(ix) and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Her nonfiction is forthcoming in Witness Magazine and was the runner-up for the 2021 Witness Magazine Literary Awards. She has completed two novels as well as a short-story collection and memoir. Dr. Mitra has received a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, worked as a fiction editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts for two years and is the co-editor-in-chief of the literary journal Silk Road Review: A Literary Crossroads. She graduated in 2010 with a doctorate and MFA from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, this after spending a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing.
Rhonda Welsh’s approach to poetry is similar to the way musicians approach music. “My poetry is meant to be heard. I always think about the rhythm and the flow of the words. That is as important to me as the message,” she says.
The only poet asked to perform during the Detroit Institute of Arts Re-opening ceremonies, her two-week retrospective of African and African-American poetry was a “must-see” during the donor and the community opening festivities. She has been featured at numerous other metro Detroit venues including The Carr Center, the Detroit Opera House, the Scarab Club, Detroit Artists Market, 5E Gallery, the Wright Museum, Campus Martius, Wayne State University, the Ford Performing and Community Arts Center, College for Creative Studies, Southfield Public Library, Casino Windsor and Marygrove College. And, like many poets, she has performed in countless coffee houses and gallery spaces throughout the Detroit area; nationwide in venues from NYC to Rock Springs, Wyoming to LA and internationally as an author at the Windsor Book Fair and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Retreat.
A native Detroiter with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Public Relations and Organizational Communication, in 2006 she self-produced her debut CD, I Saw Myself. In 2010, she released her debut poetry collection, Red Clay Legacy. This effort was met with glowing reviews including a particularly moving one from one of her poetic inspirations, Nikki Giovanni, “Rhonda Welsh offers us a poetic view of the strength and beauty of the people of Red Clay — true Earth — the beginning. Whether a love poem or a question of giving, this poet steps up to the plate, hitting a home run! We welcome this voice to the poetic discourse.”
Rhonda resides in metro Detroit and you can visit her at rhondwelsh.com.
About the host:
Stacy Parker Le Melle is the author of Government Girl: Young and Female in the White House (HarperCollins/Ecco), was the lead contributor to Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath (McSweeney’s), and chronicles stories for The Katrina Experience: An Oral History Project. She is a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Nonfiction Literature. Her recent narrative nonfiction has been published in Callaloo, Apogee Journal, The Atlas Review, Cura, Kweli Journal, Nat. Brut, The Nervous Breakdown, The Offing, Phoebe, Silk Road and The Florida Review where the essay was a finalist for the 2014 Editors’ Prize for nonfiction. Originally from Detroit, Le Melle lives in Harlem where she curates the First Person Plural Reading Series. Follow her on Twitter at @stacylemelle.