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A Juneteenth Reflection: What’s the Future Got To Do With It?
Thursday, June 15
5:30-7:30 PM ET
virtual event; open to all mentees, all mentors, and the public
Join Girls Write Now and Howard University professor and Founder of the writing for healing non-profit SOAR, Kimberly Collins, for a reflective Juneteenth discussion that allows us to excavate our origin stories while healing for our future.
Afrofuturism pays homage to our ancestral past to better understand our present. In this genre that centers Black history and culture and incorporates science-fiction, technology, and futuristic elements into literature, music, and the visual arts, we will explore the roots of a form whose tentacles reach beyond Tina Turner’s blues and Octavia Butler’s dystopian novels to the manifestation of our ancestors’ prayers.
Meet the Teaching Artist
Kimberly Collins
Kimberly A. Collins is a Callaloo Fellow and Pushcart finalist who teaches English at Howard University. She is the author of two books of poetry, Bessie’s Resurrection (Indolent Books 2018) and Slightly Off Center (1993) as well as a collection of essays Choose You Wednesday Wisdom to Wake Your Soul (2017). She is the founder of SOAR (So Others Ascend Righteously) where she conducts writing for healing programs. A proud Alum of Howard University where she earned her MA in African American and American literature, and Spalding University where she earned her MFA. Her early work appeared in the seminal anthology edited by Ras Baraka and Kevin Powell, In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers. Her most recent poetry appears in: The 100 year house: Poems of Black Resilience (2022), Beltway Quarterly (2019), 50/50: Poems & Translations by Women over 50 (2018), Pittsburg Poetry Review, Revise the Psalm: The Gwendolyn Brooks, Anthology; Syracuse Cultural Workers’ 2017 Women Artist Datebook, Truth Feasting: Anthology of African American Writers (2016), The Berkeley Review and more. She is a native of Philadelphia who currently resides in Washington, D.C.
This event is open to:
all mentees, all mentors and the public