CityLit presents a Cave Canem afternoon reading featuring DANEZ SMITH & REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS and presenting an ensemble of regional fellows in partnership with the Motor House.
This year CityLit and the Motor House, in partnership welcome featured poets DANEZ SMITH and REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS to A Home for the Heart to Live In, which signifies a reunion of poets, a revival of a pre-pandemic program, and a renewal and declaration of the importance of words by way of a poem. Won’t you poet that, Lucille Clifton used to say when she heard something profound and singular to an experience. CityLit has long believed it is one thing to read poetry in quiet reflection in one’s own company, quite another to hear poetry in a roomful of word lovers, in a space that embraces the extraordinary along with the ordinary reflections of wordsmiths, celebrated and acknowledged. If home is a heart we live in, CityLit is a place to seek refuge for the velocity of language. Join us for a Sunday afternoon of poetry where we showcase a spectacular round-up of poets.
Last year’s iteration included poets Yona Harvey and Brionne Janae, and an ensemble of regional fellows in partnership with the Motor House. Sunday, December 8th, along with our featured poets, and curated by REGINALD HARRIS, we welcome ABDUL ALI, BRIAN GILMORE, ALAN KING, LAUREN RUSSELL, KATEEMA LEE, JADI Z. OMOWALE, STEVEN LEYVA, ALEXA PATRICK, STEWART SHAW, TERRI CROSS DAVIS, and HAYES DAVIS.
Registration is requested but not required. Walk-ins are welcomed. For more information or to register, please visit: https://citylitproject.salsalabs.org/AHomefortheHearttoLiveIn2024 or contact us at
in**@ci************.org
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DANEZ SMITH
Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.
danezsmithpoet.com
Instagram: @danez_smif
X: @danez_smif
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REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country. For more than twenty years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award-winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post-incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of paper-making.
Betts won the 2019 National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his NY Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.
www.dwaynebetts.com
Instagram: @dwaynebetts
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REGGIE HARRIS
Born in Annapolis and raised in Baltimore, Reginald Harris won the 2012 Cave Canem / Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for Autogeography. His first book, 10 Tongues, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the ForeWord Book of the Year. A Cave Canem Fellow, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and recipient of Individual Artist Awards for poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, his poetry, fiction, reviews, and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals, and online, including Baltimore Review, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, smartish pace, Poetry, The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, and the Of Poetry and Protest: Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, and Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing anthologies. He and his partner live in Brooklyn, New York.
Instagram: @reginald.harris2
X: @rmharris
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Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping which won the 2014 New Issues Poetry Book Prize selected by Fannie Howe. He teaches creative writing at Morgan State University.
www.abdulali.net
Instagram: @abdulalism
X: @abdulalism
Native Washington DC Bard and Barrister, Brian Gilmore is the author of four books of poetry including ‘come see about me marvin (Wayne State University Press), a Michigan Notable Book selection for 2020. His other books are ‘elvis presley is alive and well and living in harlem,’ (Third World Press), ‘ We Didn’t Know Any Gangsters‘ (Cherry Castle Publishing), and Jungle Nights and Soda Fountain Rags (Karibu Books). A long-time public interest lawyer-advocate for tenants and the poor, he has held full-time faculty posts teaching social justice law at Howard University and Michigan State University. Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Maryland – College Park in the MLAW Program.
Instagram: @bumpyjonasdc
X: @bumpyjonasdc
Alan King is a multidisciplinary artist and author of three collections of poetry. He lives with his family in Bowie, MD.
Instagram: @aking020881
X: @aking020881
Kateema Lee is a Washington D.C. native. Her work has been published in print and online journals such as Beltway Poetry Quarterly, African American Review, Gargoyle, Baltimore Review, and others. Kateema is the author of three chapbooks, Almost Invisible, Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer, and Mundane Things. Her full collection, Transcript of the Unnamed, explores joy, identity, violence, and the “brief, bright lives” of missing and forgotten black women in Washington, DC.
https://www.kateemalee.com/
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. His second book of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, is forthcoming from Blair Publishing in Spring 2025. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.
https://stevenleyva.wordpress.com/
Instagram: @sdleyva
X: @sdleyva
Jadi Z. Omowale is a poet and fiction writer. Her most recent publication is The Goddess in the Girl, a poetry collection. Her poem “Diagnosis-the Suga” was recently published in The Common Language Project: Ascent, 2024. Her novel Soul Look Back in Wonder will be released in February 2025. She lives in Harford County, Maryland. CityLit proudly claims her as one of its Gladiators.
Alexa Patrick (she/her) is a vocalist and poet from Connecticut. She is the author of Remedies for Disappearing (Haymarket Books 2023) and holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and more. In spring 2023, Alexa made her stage production debut as Un/Sung in the opera We Shall Not Be Moved, (dire. Bill T. Jones). You may find her work in publications including Adroit, CRWN Magazine, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. Visit alexapatrick.com for more.
Instagram: @alexalaurel
X: @getfreealexap
Lauren Russell is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024); Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Instagram: @laureninred (private account)
STEWART SHAW is a local Baltimore-based poet as well as a librarian with the Enoch Pratt Library.