Join The Virginia Festival of the Book for a virtual reading and discussion with Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay. This event will be held at 12pm EST. Register here!
For those attending Winter Institute, tune in for a five-minute “poetry interlude” with torrin a. greathouse, author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound. 4:30pm ET; learn more here!
Join the Northwestern Michigan College Library and Title Track on Saturday, February 20, 2021, at 6 pm CST/7 pm EST for a conversation about how memory, family and our collective histories shape our identity with musician and author Antonio Michael Downing (aka John Orpheus) and Kaylan Waterman, musician and host of Detroit’s Kumbuka, an annual remembrance of African Americans in the literary arts.
What is home? The house you grew up in? Your hometown? Where-ever your family stays?
When I was 11 everything I thought I knew about home and who I was disappeared. I went to sleep in a rainforest and woke up in a blizzard. I moved from Southern Trinidad in the Caribbean Sea to Northern Ontario, Canada. My grandmother Miss Excelly, who was my whole universe, was gone. The way people looked and spoke, the assumptions they made, were all gone. My place in the world was gone. And everything that followed was a mad scramble to find a way back to a sense of belonging.
Saga Boy is my return back to that place. This is a memoir of my scattered family, of colonialism, of childhood trauma, of blackness, of placelessness, and of an old lady’s prayers living far beyond her life. I travelled through North America, shared stages with rock stars, took meetings with tech tycoons, and changed my name many times in pursuit of the elusive sense of arrival. And there is still a little boy inside me. He is still in the jungle, running through the bush, singing her songs, with a guava wood scepter and a hibiscus crown. This book is the alchemy of his experience. The saga of a boy returning home.
—Antonio Michael Downing, author of Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming
Antonio Michael Downing is an author, speaker, and musical artist. His memoir Saga Boy was called “singularly dazzling” by Kiese Laymon and “the triumph of Blackness everywhere” by Scotiabank Giller Prize–winner Ian Williams.
Join the Concord Free Public Library for an afternoon with acclaimed poets Allison Adair and Tiana Clark, who will read from their prize-winning debut collections. This event will be held on Zoom at 3pm ET. Register here!
Join UC Riverside’s Writers Week for a virtual reading and discussion with Kazim Ali, Jane Smiley, and LeAnne Howe. This event will be held on Crowdcast at 3pm PT. Register here!
