Join CityLit Project and the Enoch Pratt Free Library for a day of celebrating local and national literature. Full schedule to be announced.

Featured festival event: A Reading and Audience Q & A with Nikky Finney

THE MATTERING OF WORDS with Nikky Finney: A Reading and Talk from 1:00 - 2:00 pm

Nikky Finney reflects on the past year, the necessity of poetry, the importance of historical context and a reckoning in understanding the world we live in. Poet Saida Agostini will moderate this session. A reading, commentary, and audience Q & A.

The Writer’s Room: Poet to Poet with Nikky Finney from 3:00 - 4:15 pm

A special The Writer’s Room designed to engage and address Black poets, how to be a poet of this time, how to champion history and correction in a time of upheaval and uncertainty.

Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, is forthcoming in 2020 from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.

Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores the ways that Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her first collection of poems, just let the dead in, was a finalist for the Center of African American Poetry & Poetics’ 2020 Book Prize, as well as the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her first chapbook, STUNT (Neon Hemlock, October 2020), explores the history of Nellie Jackson, a Black woman entrepreneur who operated a brothel for sixty years in Natchez, Mississippi. Saida’s poetry can be found in Barrelhouse Magazine, the Black Ladies Brunch Collective's anthology, Not Without Our Laughter, and other publications. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Saida has been awarded honors and support for her work by the Watering Hole and Blue Mountain Center, as well as a 2018 Rubys Grant funding travel to Guyana to support the completion of her first manuscript.

Do not miss CityLit Festival events throughout the month:
March 2, Emily St. John Mandel & Jenny Offill
March 9, Terrance Hayes
March 17, George Saunders
March 24, The Joy of Grief: Finding Life in Death with Gayle Danley & Kimberley Lynne (3 week workshop series)
March 31, Somewhere in the Reflection: A Visual Presentation curated by Nia June & APoetNamedNate

Dial-In Information

Virtual login information to come.