Bourbon & Poetry Festival

The inaugural Bourbon & Poetry Festival a live-streamed event hosted by the Affrilachian Poets Featuring Mitchell Douglas, Stephanie Pruitt, Bianca Spriggs, Frank X Walker, and Asha French. This event will be streamed live on the Affrilachian Poets Facebook group page. #Bourbonandpoetryfestival2020

Guest Poets:

Nandi Comer is the author of Tapping Out (Triquarterly/Northwestern) and the chapbook American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press). She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Offing, Epiphany Magazine, The Metro Times, Crab Orchard Review, Pluck! and numerous anthologies. She directs the Allied Media Projects Speakers Bureau and is a founding member of the collective, Detroit Lit. To purchase a copy of Tapping Out from the publisher, use the 25% off coupon code COMER25.

Shauna Morgan author of the chapbook Fear of Dogs & Other Animals (Central Square Press), is a poet and scholar from a rural district in Clarendon, Jamaica. An Associate Professor of creative writing and Africana literature at Howard University in Washington, D.C., she recently moved to Lexington, Kentucky’s East End Artist Village with her husband and children. Shauna has published poetry in A Gathering Together, ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, and elsewhere. Her critical work has appeared in the CLA Journal, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and South Atlantic Review.

Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III) is a poet and non-fiction writer living in Lanham, MD. His work has been published in Crab Orchard Review, African-American Review, Ploughshares, Beltway Quarterly, and other journals. He teaches at Bowie State University in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies. His second book of poetry, One Shoe Marching Towards Heaven, will be published by Africa World Press in Summer 2020. He is currently working on a book of essays called The Wuhan Soundtrack based on his experience living in Wuhan, China.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan, 2020), based upon the life and times of Phillis Wheatley Peters, a formerly enslaved person who was the first African American woman to publish a book. In addition, Honorée is the author of a forthcoming novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021). She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, among others. Honorée is a Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.