This event will feature readings by:

Nzadi Keita
Taije Silverman

Open mic to follow. Hosted by Sibelan Forrester

Community Arts Center
414 Plush Mill Road
Wallingford PA 19086

M. Nzadi Keita’s third poetry collection, Migration Letters, forthcoming from Beacon Press in April, 2024, centers her upbringing in Black working-class Philadelphia. Her second book, Brief Evidence of Heaven, shed light on free-born, illiterate abolitionist, Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick Douglass’s first wife. Publications including Poet Lore and anthologies such as The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, have featured Keita’s poems. Her prose publications include the journal About Place, and the volume, Women, Culture, and The Sixties.

Keita served as a Professor of English at Ursinus College for 25 years, an adviser to the award-winning film, “BadddDDD Sonia Sanchez,” and a consultant with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation and Mural Arts Philadelphia. She is a member of the Black poetry collective, Cave Canem, and a recipient of grants, awards, and fellowships from the Leeway Foundation and the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, among others. Keita has presented poetry and scholarship in varied settings, including the Modern Language Association International Conference and the National Caucus of African-American Librarians.

Taije Silverman is the author of two books of poetry: Now You Can Join the Others, published in 2022, and Houses Are Fields, published in 2009. She translated the Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli from the Italian with Marina Della Putta Johnston; the book was shortlisted for the John Florio Prize. Her own poems have been selected for Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, the Anne Halley Prize for best poem in The Massachusetts Review, and "The Slowdown" with Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the Emory University Creative Writing Fellowship, the Vassar College W.K. Rose Fellowship, and residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and is faculty advisor for the literary translation journal DoubleSpeak.