MARCH 2013
(USA) 

 

Photo credit: Vic Ehi

AWP CONFERENCE AND BOOKFAIR

BOSTON

6-9 MARCH 2013

Bookstand:1307
(Open to the Public on 9 March) 

7 March

The Independent International Literary Scene: Two Launches and a Reading

3-4:30 p.m

Boston Public Library
700 Boylston Street,
Copley Square,
Boston, MA 02116
T:617-536-5400

St. Petersburg Review joins with the New England Poetry Club, Dzanc Books’ DISQUIET Lisbon Program, Summer Literary Seminars, SABLE LitMag, and Tagus Press to bring you authors Kadija (George) Sesay (Irki), Brian Sousa (Almost Gone), and  Irina Mashinski reading from their works. Elizabeth Hodges, Mikhail Iossel, and Jeff Parker introduce and comment on independent international literary networking and collaboration.

Brian Sousa has been published in various journals and anthologies, and his debut novel-in stories, Almost Gone, has just been released by Tagus Press.

Kadija (George) Sesay is the founder of SABLE LitMag, SABLE LitFest, and the SABLE Writer’s HotSpot. She is the editor of several anthologies of work by writers of African and Asian descent,, including Dreams Miracles and Jazz: New Adventures in African Fiction (Picador Africa 2008) edited with Helon Habila. She is also the series editor for the Inscribe imprint for Peepal Tree Press, their first anthology being Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry (2010). Her work has been published in magazines, journals, anthologies and  encyclopaedias in the UK, USA, and Africa and has been broadcast on BBC World Service. Her first poetry collection, Irki, has just been published by Peepal Tree Press.

Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and translator. She has authored eight  books of poetry and translations in Russian. Her work in English has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry International, Fulcrum, Zeek, The London Magazine, and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (University of Iowa Press, 2005). She is the co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk) of the forthcoming Anthology of Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky (Penguin 2015), as well as co-founder  and co-editor (with late Oleg Woolf) of the StoSvet literary project which includes Cardinal Points and Storony Sveta literary journals.

Boston Public Library
700 Boylston Street,
Copley Square,
Boston, MA 02116
T:617-536-5400

 

www.bpl.org

 

The first 25 people attending the reading receive drink tickets to the reception

5pm
City Bar,
425 Summer Street,
Boston, MA 02210
T:617-443-0888

www.citybarboston.com

9 March
12.00pm

AWP: Book signing at SABLE / St Petersburg Review
Hynes Convention Center
900 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02115

 

Thursday March 14, 2013
3pm

Moonstone Arts Center & The Charles L. Blockson Collection at Temple University Present

The Charles L. Blockson Collection,
1330 Polett Walk,
Philadelphia,
PA 19122
(215) 204-6632

Kadija Sesay & Trapeta B. Mayson

Trapeta B. Mayson is a native of Liberia. She immigrated to Philadelphia with her family in 1975. She had contributed her work to Panoramic Poetry Journal, Defiance Literary Journal, Aura – University of Alabama Literary Journal, and Drumvoices 2000 Poetry Anthology. She has been an artist-in-residence at Art Sanctuary in Philadelphia and Callaloo Writer’s Workshop at the University of Virginia. She has conducted poetry workshops at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Franklin Institute, and the Germantown Women’s Center in Philadelphia. Mayson has been a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellow and a Pew Fellow.

Mayson’s poems give voice to speakers who have traditionally been silent. She sketches stories of girls who have been forced into womanhood too early, of men struggling in economic situations they cannot overcome, and of lives in which dreams are put on hold by the challenges that accompany simply waking up for another day. Of silence, she writes, “I come from people who largely believe that things like pains and suffering are as connected to us as arms and legs. One isn’t encouraged to talk so much about him or herself because others may be going through much worse.” But Mayson’s poetry doesn’t exist to establish some relative scale of suffering. Reading of the trials – poverty, domestic violence, the glare of hatred reserved for INS bureaucrats who must tear families apart – her various narrators endure, one is less inclined to heave a sigh of relief that the subject’s miseries are so much greater than the readers than to ask how the world gets to such a sad state in the first place. If poetry has some blame for its part in making history a tale told by the victors, Mayson’s poems hold out the promise that the form may somehow yet be redeemed.

Kadjia is a Sierra Leonian Brit. Syl Cheney Coker, award winning novelist and poet (Stone Child and Other Poems) said of her book, “It is Kadija’s multicultural awakening that comes across to me, with its conflicting heterogeneity; the discovery of what it means to be  a ‘Black Briton;’ one whose childhood had the taste of sweet confectures at home and the occasional artichoke of the ‘otherness’ in the public sphere. The poems are both witty and , occasionally, deeply questioning of the existing shibboleth of race, class, taste and attitudes so commonplace in Britain. I am sure her readers will find, in many of the poems, reflections of their own coming of age days; their peculiar instances of iconic changes, pride in the ‘self’, a going out into the wolf-world of the ‘other,’ and, most important of all, the sense of arrival into a complete persona.”

 

27 March
6pm   

Perfect Sense Reading Series – NY
Kadija Sesay, Elizabeth Hodges, and Marc Jaffee read at

Cornelia Street Café,
29 Cornelia Street,
New York, NY
10014

$8 includes a drink

Perfect Sense on FB

http://corneliastreetcafe.com/contact.html

 

28 March
4.30pm   

A reading from IRKI and Q&A with Kadija Sesay

The Geneseo Literary Forum
SUNY Geneseo
1 College Cir,
Geneseo, NY 14454
room:tba

http://www.geneseo.edu/news_events/kadija-sesay-read-her-writings-march-28

 

7:00 pm

PROFILED: RACE IN CIVIC CIRCLES Series – Race, Arts & Culture
A civic discussion on race and the arts

The Baobab Cultural Center 728 University Ave Rochester NY 14607
http://www.thebaobab.org/event.php?id=522

31 March

4-6 Pm

University of Miami

http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/472132529521087/

APRIL 2013 – POETRY MONTH

(USA, CARIBBEAN AND WEST AFRICA )

3 April

On the Radio!

St Thomas

 

3 April

Virgin Islands Caribbean Cultural Center (VICCC) presents a launch reading from
Irki the debut poetry collection from award-winning activist and publisher

University of The Virgin Islands

ACC(Administration and Conference Center)

St. Thomas Campus

St Thomas

USVI

6:00p-7:30pm.

Join award winning Sierra Leonean/British activist writer,based in the Gambia and publisher of SABLE LitMag (London), Kadija Sesay as she reads from  IRKI. She  will discuss her Caribbean links alongside her  African diaspora heritage. Ms Sesay will also speak about the Global trends in African Diaspora migration, art and networking in the new information age.

RSVP  Tuesday, April 2, 2013  Ludlow Bailey 786 290-7359 or  Dr. Chenzira Davis Kahina
Virgin Islands Caribbean Cultural Center (VICCC) Director, University of the Virgin Islands- College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences (UVI-CLASS) T: 340 244-2524

7 April

Poetry Workshop : ‘Elsewhere’
BloomBars,
Washington DC
3 -5pm

Elsewhere
We are going to delve into the part of us that is not visible, the part of us that was born elsewhere, whose parents come from elsewhere, religion is elsewhere, live elsewhere. Please bring something from your elsewhere -object, photo, interesting piece of info from  your memory or the internet.

How does your elsewhere relate to your now?
If we have time, we will ‘swop’ with someone else’s ‘elsewhere’ and see where that takes us.

$15 donation

https://www.facebook.com/events/460559294016826/

8 April
The Garden Open Mic, hosted by Gowri

8.30pm

Guest poet @ BloomBars

3222 11th St NW

Washington DC

$7 donation

Sign-up list opens at 8:30 pm and the first performer goes on at 9:00 pm

contact: circlesaroundus@gmail.com

doors and list open at 8:30; show is from 9 to 11pm

9 April

6:30- 8.30 pm
Celebrating Poetry Month – Kadija Sesay, DuEwa Frazier and A. Lyric

Center for Black Literature
President’s Conference Center
Medgar Evers College, CUNY
1650 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11225
T: 718-804-8883
http://www.centerforblackliterature.org/calendar.html

10 April

On the Radio!
Pacifica Radio WPFW(89.3)- Africa Now! – 1pm with Mwiza Munthali
http://www.wpfwfm.org/programming/schedule-grid.html

11 April  

Launch of Irki

6:30 – 8pm

Kadija Sesay

introduced by E. Ethelbert Miller

Busboys and Poets

Langston Room  @ Busboys and Poets, 14th & V

2021 14th St, NW

Washington, DC 20001

Supported by TransAfrica  

13 April

7pm ’til late

Kadija Sesay & Alan King

A Poetic Conversation

African American Civil War Memorial and Museum

925 Vermont Ave NW,

Washington, DC 20001

T:202-667-2667

https://www.facebook.com/events/1020815899857710

AFRICA LAUNCH READINGS

APRIL
(GAMBIA)

27 APRIL
4-6 p.m.
TIMBOOKTOO  Bookshop
3 Garba Jahumpa Road
Bakau New Town
The Gambia
timbooktoo@qanet.gm

Kadija Sesay reads from her debut collection – IRKI
and invites a discussion around how we can encourage
the reading and writing of poetry in The Gambia.
T:782-2705

MAY
(Ghana)

16-19 MAY
Yari Yari Ntoaso: Continuing the Dialogue The word yari, from the Kuranko language of Sierra Leone, means “future,” while ntoaso, from the Akan language of Ghana, translates as understanding and agreement

SABLE will sponsor a Poetry Reading . Dates tbc

July
(UK)

10 July
Loose Muse

Kadija Sesay reads her poetry at the first Loose Muse  nearly 10 years ago.
She returns to read from her debut poetry collection, IRKI
at the
Poetry Café,
22 Betterton Street,
London WC2
MC Agnes Meadows

13 July

Kadija Sesay performs poetry from IRKI at DEAD POETS

6pm – 10pm

www.deadpoetssocietyrv.tumblr.com/

www.youtube.com/channel/UC2A-V5uXnj6IoJCMY9WdO9w

www.facebook.com/pages/DEAD–POETS/146164645525679

www.twitter.com/DeadPoetsTweet

Follow us on INSTAGRAM – 13DEADPOETS

SEPTEMBER

19 September

7.30pm-10pm
Global Fusion Music and Arts presents
A Celebration of the International Day of Peace
headlined by Kadija Sesay
Plus a great line up of musicians and poets from
Ghana, Tanzania, Scotland, Wales, Ireland
Antigua, Nigeria and Greenwich
Charlton House, Charlton Road, London SE7 8RE
Book on: www.wegottickets.com
available on the door from 7pm
T:020 8858 9497

UK LAUNCH OF IRKI

Kadija Sesay and Friends

2 October
7pm
@ The Barbican Library
Barbican Centre
Silk St, London,
London EC2Y 8DS

MC Dorothea Smartt
plus invited poets (in no order of favouritism!)

Malika Booker – reading from her new collection – Pepperseed
Patricia Foster – with performance from her new poetry video – Lips
Sai Murray – reading from his new collection – AdLiberation

It will also be in celebration of National Poetry Day and a significant birthday year!
An event for people who LOVE good poetry, good wine and good food!
Products from all the poets  will be available on the night to savour using cash/cc/BACS!

Please book on:
http://www.barbican.org.uk/library/event-detail.asp?ID=15239

https://www.facebook.com/IrkiPoetryBook

You should also read the best poetry for inspiration. The standard poets have always been the most inspirational creators. From a good line of poetry, you may get the inspiration for the career of a life time. Many a great man and woman was first inspired by some attractive line or verse of poetry

Marcus Garvey Jr. (17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940)