Aunt Lute and POC United Panel: Creating Our Own ‘Table’

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Wednesday, April 7th, 5 PM PST

Many marginalized writers celebrate the moment that they receive “a seat at the table,” and this is quite often their goal. Yet, others of us believe that having a seat at the table is another way of waiting to be included or invited to attend, thereby still centering whiteness. This panel will focus on writers of color who are creating their own tables, including Tongo Eisen Martin, Tara Betts, and Neelanjana Banerjee.

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin was recently named San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate and is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He is launching Black Freighter Press, a platform for building movement culture and supporting Black literary arts, with a specific focus on incarcerated poets, Bay Area poets of color, and Black women.
Tara Betts is the author of the poetry collections Break the Habit, Arc & Hue, and the forthcoming Refuse to Disappear. Aside from coediting several anthologies, Tara is Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and the Lit Editor at Newcity. She is currently working on establishing The Whirlwind Learning Center on Chicago’s South Side as a space for arts education, community space, and cultural programming.
Neelanjana Banerjee’s writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, PANK Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, World Literature Today and many other places. She is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, an independent press dedicated to Asian Pacific American and Asian Diasporic literature. She teaches writing and literature classes at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. She lives in Los Angeles, and is at work on a novel.

This event is the second installment of a collaborative project between Aunt Lute Books and POC United to support marginalized writers, made possible by funds from the California Arts Council.

Presented by Aunt Lute Books

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