The Black Matter Is Life: Poetry for Engagement and Overcoming
A Hybrid Poetry Reading & Discussion Program
The Black Matter is Life: Poetry for Engagement and Overcoming examines the work of well-known and little-known Black poets to explore and discuss the rich tradition and innovation found in African American poetry.
Join us in partnership with Seacoast Outright for a special live event at The Players' Ring featuring poems by Black, LGBTQ+ poets.
Poetry is a powerful art form, one that offers profound insights into what it means to be human. Through the creative, succinct, and melodious use of language, poets render into words their joys, their challenges, their vulnerabilities, and their discoveries, thus providing shape and meaning to the human connection and shared emotional experience.
This program is designed to build bridges across the racial divide by introducing the audience to the writings of a number of African American poets whose work has shone a light on a rich cultural heritage that has often gone unexplored. We ask the audience to consider how African American poetry provides tools for healing our nation’s deep racial wounds.
Space is limited for the in-person event.
Register for In-Person Nov. 10 Event Here
November 10 | 7:00 PM | The Players Ring | In Person
"We Go On Loving" with Guest Poet, John-Francis Quiñonez
Featured Poets: Samaa Abdurraqib, Ariana Brown & Alan Palea Lopez
With Special Student Poets: Ki Odums, Lydia Osei
“We Go On Loving” explores how young people in BIPOC and LGBTQ communities love one another, love themselves, and love their communities by looking at the literary works of Black LGBTQ+ poets.
There are an estimated 35 million BIPOC youths in the United States who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual and other youths identifying as transgender, intersex, or questioning, who continually face many challenges and may feel isolated, alienated, and fearful as they try to navigate society in their emerging awareness of their sexual, gender and race identity.
For this program, submissions from student poets were selected by a committee to explore what it means to hold these identities in our society today.
Poems:
Ariana Brown - "For the Black Kids in my 8th Grade Spanish Class"
Ariana Brown - "Dear White Girls in My Spanish Class"
Alan Palea Lopez - "A Daily Prayer"
Samaa Abdurraqib- "The Fly Over"
Price: Pay What You Can
Virtual Schedule
The Black Matter Is Life virtual event is a three-part program hosted by two New England scholars in conversation with a featured guest poet. The three events explore the vast diversity within African American poetic tradition. Each discussion deconstructs four poems grouped by themes. Conversations center these poems within the context of the African American literary tradition, their cultural heritage, the traditions they encompassed, and the relevance this tradition has to us today. The series will also explore the question, “Why does African American Poetry matter?”
NOVEMBER 17 | 7:00 PM | Virtual
"Continuing Conversations" with guest poet, Theo Wilson
Student Poet: Mary Olasore
Featuring Poems by:
Nikki Giovanni - "Allowables"
Rudy Francisco - "Mercy (after Nikki Giovanni)"
Paul Laurence Dunbar - "We Wear The Mask"
Maya Angelou - "The Mask"
DECEMBER 15 | 7:00 PM | Virtual
"Poetry of the Ordinary Day" with guest poet, Marilyn Nelson
Student Poet: Toby Gourvitz
Featuring Poems By:
Lucille Clifton - "Cutting Greens"
Kevin Young - "Eddie Priest's barbershop & Notary"
Yesenia Montilla - "A Perfect Game"
JANUARY 19 | 7:00 PM | Virtual
"Connections" with guest poet, L'Merchie Frazer
Student Poet: Corinne Conly
Featuring Poems By:
Danez Smith - "dogs!"
Sterling Brown - "Ma Rainey"
Ruth Foreman - "Poetry Should Ride the Bus"
Guest Poets
John-Francis Quiñonez (They/Them)
is a Desert Flower & Current Resident of Providence, RI/ a Queer Writer & Multimedia Artist/ Maker of ice creams & tamales/ House Manager of the Columbus Theatre/ Current Resident of the Queer.Archive.Work. project/ has a Forthcoming collection of Poems with Write Bloody Publishing (‘22) entitled Keep Your Little Lights Alive (Poems After Kate Bush’s "Hounds of Love" & Others)
You can find their work in Pigeon Pages, Ours Poetica, Voicemail Poems, Slamfind, Counterclock, Maps for Teeth, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, and as part of a playing card deck with Game Over Books. Check out a recent interview with the author here as well as this review:
"Keep Your Little Lights Alive is a marvelous balance of moxie and tenderness, where poems take on the profound interiority of queerness, self-love and the pursuit of memory. Set against the iconic Kate Bush album, Hounds of Love, John-Francis Quiñonez writes of hunger, restoration and survival beneath a nostalgic haze, posing pointed questions that demand the speaker be seen for who they truly are: Do you not feel a Daughter’s fur in my hands? / Do you not know / how long / I can stay Quiet? Quiñonez’ poems exude a shameless curiosity, something rare and vital in the genre right now. Writers of intention aid us in our personal liberation, and Keep Your Little Lights Alive is indeed the lighthouse we can sprint towards."
- Rachel McKibbens
Theo Wilson began his speaking career in the N.A.A.C.P. at the age of 15 and has always had a passion for social justice. He attended Florida A&M University, where he obtained his B.A. in Theater Performance. Theo returned to Denver and is now the Executive Director of Shop Talk Live, inc. The organization uses the barbershop as a staging ground for community dialogue and healing. After viral video success beginning in 2015, Theo grew his social media following to well over 70,000 people. Due to audience demand, he published his first book in 2017, “The Law of Action.” The book addresses some of the misconceptions about the law of attraction, and the role direct action plays in manifestation. It can be found on Amazon.com, or on his website, TheoWilson.net. In 2017, his TED Talk entitled, “A Black Man Goes Undercover in the Alt-Right,” was seen worldwide, amassing a total of over 17 million views. Theo is the host of The History Channel’s hit series, “I Was There.” He has been featured on Good Morning America, BuzzFeed, CNN, Good Day Canada, and TV One.
Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of seventeen poetry books and the memoir How I Discovered Poetry. She is also the author of The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, which won the 1998 Poets’ Prize, Carver: A Life In Poems, which won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and Fortune’s Bones, which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. She is also the author of the biography Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor’s Life (2022). Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Frost Medal. She was the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.
L’Merchie Frazier is a Boston-based visual artist, performing artist, educator, consultant, activist, and philanthropist. She is currently the Director of Education at the Museum of African American History in Boston. Through her visual artwork, she creates evocative fiber and metal sculptures, innovative mixed media installations, stunning hand-crafted beaded jewelry, and a powerful quilt-series, “The Quilted Chronicles.” Her work has been exhibited at numerous institutions including the University of Vermont, the American Museum of Art and Design, New York, and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC.
Program Facilitators
Courtney Marshall is an Instructor of English at Phillips Exeter Academy where she teaches courses on African-American literature. She also advises the Afro-Latinx Society and chaperones student trips to Louisiana and Alabama. This year, she is a Fellow with the PEA Center for Teaching and Learning.
Dr. Dennis Britton is an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare and Renaissance British Literature. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014). Dr. Britton is a member of the Boards of Directors at the Black Heritage Trail, NH.
Series Sponsors
