Join us for the second season of the Lampblack Reading Series. Our second event will take place at MoCADA located at 10 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217.
Featuring Soraya Palmer, Rich Benjamin, and Samiya Bashir!
This event is free and open to the public.
Doors open at 4PM.
Readings will begin at 4:30PM.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lampblack-reading-series-tickets-640107427547?aff=oddtdtcreator
Featured Readers:
Soraya Palmer is the author of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, which recently won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction and has been shortlisted for the Pen/Open Book Award. It has been named a best or most anticipated novel by Today, Elle, Ms. Magazine, and Goodreads among others. She has been awarded grants, residences, and fellowships for her writing from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, Blue Mountain Residency, and the Nawat Fes Residency in Fes, Morocco. She was born and raised in Flatbush and is a licensed clinical social worker who has organized and advocated for criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, tenants facing eviction, and victims of police brutality. She currently teaches Graduate Fiction at CUNY City College and Writing Magical Realism for the Center for Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Nicholas.
Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States.
Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her fourth collection, I Hope this Helps, is forthcoming in May 2025 from Nightboat Books.
Rich Benjamin is the author of Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History (Pantheon Books, 2025), a family memoir that doubles as a portrait of America. Benjamin’s first book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America (2009), was selected for an Editor’s Choice award from the American Library Association. Now in its second printing, this groundbreaking study is one of the first to have illuminated in advance the rise of Trumpism, white anxiety, and white nationalism in current US life. Benjamin’s writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and he’s interviewed often in the international and US media, including NPR, MSNBC, and PBS. His work has received support from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, Civitella, Bellagio, Princeton University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.
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About us:
The Lampblack Literary Foundation (Lampblack) is a non profit 501(c)(3) organization created by Black writers to support, promote, and celebrate Black writers. We provide monetary relief through direct aid, connect writers and readers of Black literature through virtual and in-person literary events, and publish a magazine dedicated to voices from the Black diaspora. Lampblack is committed to the advancement of Black literature and strives to expand the reach of this work because critical engagement with Black culture is a necessary and radical act.
To support our mission and help keep the Lampblack Reading Series and other vital programs free, please click here.
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The Lampblack Reading Series is supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council’s Brooklyn Arts Fund (BAF) Grant and Local Arts Support (LAS) Grant.
Brooklyn Arts Fund (BAF) is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.
Local Arts Support (LAS) is sponsored, in part, by the Statewide Community Regrants (SCR) Program of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.