Poets & Writers Theater

“I am afraid / that the mouths I feed will turn against me / will refuse to swallow in the silence / I am warning them to avoid.” Audre Lorde reads her poem “Blackstudies,” which appears in her book New York Head Shop and Museum (Broadside Press, 1974), in this video from the Poetry Center’s American Poetry Archives collection at San Francisco State University.

“Lorde is a towering figure in the world of letters,” says Roxane Gay in this 92Y virtual event celebrating the publication of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (Norton, 2020), which Gay edited. Joining Gay to discuss and read Lorde’s poetry and prose are Mahogany L. Browne, Saeed Jones, and Porsha Olayiwola.

In this Waterstones video, Bernadine Evaristo introduces her novel Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton, 2019), which she describes as “fusion fiction” and a “celebration of Black womanhood,” and the books that influenced her as a young writer. Evaristo won the 2019 Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other, sharing the prize with Margaret Atwood for The Testaments (Chatto & Windus, 2019).