Join us for our monthly Pieces of Eight Poetry Series, hosted by Derrick Weston Brown & featuring members of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective!

The Black Ladies Brunch Collective’s poetry anthology, Not Without Our Laughter,  is a collection of humorous and joyful poems, riffing on Langston Hughes’s novel Not Without Laughter. It explores topics of family, work, love and sexuality. The women of BLBC believe, like Hughes, that even in these currently tense racial times, laughter and the celebration of life is crucial. Teri Ellen Cross Davis,  Katy Richey, celeste doaks, Saida Agostini, and Tafisha Edwards will be joined by Amanda Johnston, author of Another Way to Say Enter for a reading filled with laughter, love, and Black girl magic.

Black Ladies Brunch Collective is: Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Anya Creightney, Katy Richey, celeste doaks, Saida Agostini, and Tafisha Edwards.

Open & free to the public, but RSVP required. Sign up here!

The Pieces of Eight Reading Series is a monthly curated reading with a featured artist, an audience-assisted interview and limited open mic.  The Pieces of Eight Series takes its name from the extremely influential and nearby, that  Rock Community Center that birthed the 8 -Rock Collective,  workshop & reading series in the early 90’s in historic Anacostia SE.

About the poets:

Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet and Cave Canem graduate fellow. Her work has been published in the Black Ladies Brunch Collective’s anthology, Not Without Our Laughter, the Baltimore Sun, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, the Delaware Poetry Review, pluck! – The Affrilachian Journal of Arts and Culture, TORCH Literary Arts, among others. She is currently working on her first collection, uprisings in a state of joy. Most recently she read her work on the Ulster BBC, and was featured at the Ormston House in Limerick, Ireland.

Anya Creightney, a Cave Canem fellow, is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico with roots in Kingston and Copenhagen. A poet, editor and coordinator, she is a Programs Specialist at the Poetry & Literature Center in the Library of Congress.

Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields, Wrecking Ball Press, UK. Cornrows was listed as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2015” by Beltway Quarterly Poetry. doaks is a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee; her most recent poetry can be found in Chicago Quarterly Review, and in the Rabbit Ears: TV poems anthology edited by Joel Allegretti. Doaks received her MFA degree from North Carolina State University, and is currently teaching creative writing at Morgan State University. You can find her on Twitter @thedoaksgirl

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of Haint, published by Gival Press and winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry.  She is a Cave Canem fellow and has attended the Soul Mountain Writer’s Retreat, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is on the Advisory Council of Split This Rock (a biennial poetry festival in Washington DC), a semi-finalist judge for the NEA’s Poetry Out Loud and a member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective. Her work has been published in many anthologies including: Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. Her work can be read online and in the following journals: Delaware Poetry Review, Fledging Rag, Harvard Review, Little Patuxent Review, North American Review, MER VOX, Poet Lore, Tin House, Torch, and Sligo Journal. She is the Poetry Coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.

Tafisha A. Edwards is the author of THE BLOODLET, winner of Phantom Books’ 2016 Breitling Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in The Offing, PHANTOM, Bodega Magazine, The Atlas Review, The Little Patuxent Review, and other print and online publications. She is the Assistant Poetry Editor for Gigantic Sequins, a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Jiminéz-Porter Writers’ House, a Cave Canem Graduate fellow, and a former educator with the American Poetry Museum. She is the recipient of a Zoland Poetry Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center and has received scholarships to The Juniper Summer Writing Institute, The Minnesota Northwoods Writers’ Conference and other writing workshops and conferences.

Katy Richey’s work has appeared in Rattle, Cincinnati Review, RHINO, The Offing and other journals. She received an honorable mention for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for Tubelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Poetry Award. She has received fellowships from The Cave Canem Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops and is the recipient of a Fine Arts Work Center Walker Scholarship for Writers of Color and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. She hosts the Sunday Kind of Love reading series open mic at Busboys and Poets in Washington D.C., sponsored by Split This Rock Festival.

Amanda Johnston earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press). Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry, Kinfolks Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, Pluck!, No, Dear and the anthologies, Small Batch, Full, di-ver-city, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. The recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Johnston is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, a cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding executive director of Torch Literary Arts. She serves on the Cave Canem Foundation board of directors and currently lives in Texas.