Words @ Weeksville, our new literary series returns this March with an incredible line-up! Occurring on the 4th Wednesday of each month, the reading series will present inspirational, intriguing and provocative works-in-progress (as well as snippets of recently published work!) from accomplished writers across a wide range of genres, all part of a progressive black literary tradition.
This month will feature Uzodimna Iweala, Greg Pardlo, and Naima Coster!
The Pulitzer-prize winning poet presents his debut as a memoirist with Air Traffic (Knopf) the story of Pardlo's air-traffic controller father and the 1981 strike that changed his and his family's life. Gregory Pardlo's ollectio Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honor include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collectionTotem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays forthcoming from Knopf.
The debut novelist of Halsey Street, a story of family, loss, and renewal, set in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Arts & Letters, Catapult, The Rumpus, Aster(ix), A Practical Wedding, Guernica, and has been anthologized in The Best of Kweli and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home. Naima is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the 2017 Cosmonauts Avenue Nonfiction Prize, judged by Roxane Gay. Naima studied creative writing at Yale, Fordham University, and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. She has taught writing to students in prison, youth programs, and universities. She currently teaches at Wake Forest University and is a Senior Fiction Editor at Kweli. Naima tweets as @zafatista and writes the newsletter, Bloom How Must.