great weather for MEDIA celebrates A Gathering of the Tribes this Black History Month with a reading from Tribe’s revolutionary Black and allied Poets.
Featured readers: Saida Agostini, Dr. Antoinette Ellis-Williams, Patricia Spears Jones, and Lamont B. Steptoe.
Hosted by Chavisa Woods and Thomas Fucaloro
Tribes 16: The Black Lives Matter Issue will be available for purchase, and signing.
Plus open mic
21+
$3 suggested donation. Two drink min, alcoholic or non.
Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores how Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her work is featured in Plume, Hobart Pulp, Barrelhouse, Auburn Avenue, amongst others. Saida’s work can be found in several anthologies, including Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy, The Future of Black, and Plume Poetry 9. She is the author of STUNT (Neon Hemlock, October 2020), a chapbook reimagining the life of Nellie Jackson, a Black madam and FBI spy from Natchez Mississippi. Her first full length collection released by Alan Squire Publishing (March 2022), let the dead in, was a finalist for the 2020 New Issues Poetry Prize and the Center for African American Arts & Poetics Poetry Prize. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, Saida is a two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and Best of the Net Finalist. Her work has received support from the Ruby Artist Grants, and the Blue Mountain Center, amongst others. She lives online at www.saidaagostini.com
Dr. Antoinette Ellis-Williams is Chair and Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies at New Jersey City University. Ellis- Williams is an emerging Jamaican born multi-media interdisciplinary abstract contemporary artist, and poet. Audible selected her mural Say So! Dance for the first phase of the Newark Artist Collaboration. She has had solo exhibitions at the Visual Art Gallery and NJCU and Moody-Jones Gallery. Her work has appeared at Newark Museum of Art, NJ State Museum, Morristown Performing Arts Center with Art in the Atrium, Consulate General of Greece in NYC; Black Juried Art Exhibition, Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Ill, CLIO Art Fair, “The Art of Protest”, New York City; “The 2021 NJ Arts Annual ReVision & Respond”, Newark Museum; Neopoprealism Press, THIRD PLACE WINNER International Online Competition; “Into the Light” Art in the Atrium Virtual Exhibition; “Works on Paper”, Long Beach Island Foundation’s 23rd annual National Juried Exhibition. Juror, Lanka Tattersall, Curator of Drawings and Prints at MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art and the international juried Prizm Art Fair in Miami, Florida with Calabar Gallery. She is the author of Black Gardenias: A Collection of Poems, Stories, & Sayings from A Woman’s Heart (Semaj Publishing, 2013). She is a playwright and actor of Scarf Diaries. Her one woman play premiered at NJPAC in 2017 and at reg. e gaines’ 2021 Downtown Urban Art Festival in NYC. Scarf Diaries won BEST play. Ellis-William’s documentary Lee Hagan: Connecting Generations (2016) won best short documentary at the Newark Black Film Festival. Her TedX Talk Finding Justice in the Land of the Free (2015) tried to unpack her immigrant status in America.
Patricia Spears Jones is poet, playwright, anthologist, educator, and cultural activist is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. She is author of The Beloved Community, Copper Canyon Press, 2023; A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems and nine other poetry volumes. Anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song: Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin; 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI, Best ofSmall Presses; and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Poems recently published in print and online journals: Prairie Schooner, Persimmon Tree; The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail; Ms. Muse, Plume, and CUTTHROAT: A Journal of the Arts. She edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of
New York City Women Poets. She has taught at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 92Y; Poets House, Community of Writers, Truro Center for the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center, Gemini Ink, Brooklyn Poets, Hugo House, Hurston-Wright, and as faculty at Hollins University, Adelphi University, CUNY, and Barnard College. She is organizer of the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute. www.psjones.com.
Lamont B. Steptoe (born 1949 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American poet, photographer and publisher. Steptoe edited and published three collections of the late South African poet and activist, Dennis Brutus, under Whirlwind Press.
Tribes #16, The Black Lives Matter Issue, with Guest Editor Ishmael Reed, Art Editor Danny Simmons, and Assistant Editor Margaret Porter Troupe, is now available for purchase.
Tribes #16, The Black Lives Matter Issue, is a full color, 8’x 10’ print journal, featuring visual art, poetry and prose, from emerging and established revolutionary artists of our time, celebrating the Black Lives Matter movement and speaking to the issues that propelled its formation and growth.
Tribes #16 includes art and writing by nearly 40 vital artists, including: Anthony Barboza, Gina Beavers, Lamont Steptoe, Tony Medina, Kevin Powell, Tracy K. Smith, Walter Mosley, Nile Livingston, Nashira Priester, Quincy Troupe, Aisha T. Bell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rosy Keyser, Kalam Mikael, Jerome China, John Simms and others.