An Evening with Lolita Stewart-White and Hattie Mae Williams

🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Please RSVP only if you intend to join us. Can't make the event?

Lolita Stewart-White's black frag/ments is a breathtaking series of narrative-lyric poems about the fragmentation of the Black body, family, and community facilitated by the historic and ongoing racism in the US healthcare system.
After her husband’s cancer diagnosis, Stewart-White finds herself haunted by the trauma Black Americans continue to face in medical settings. These poems, both brazen and tenderhearted, explore enduring love in the face of grief and hardship while drawing parallels to past injustices. Stewart-White expertly weaves ancestral and present voices together, resulting in an intergenerational archive that centers one family’s challenging journey in a broader context of how black people protest, repair, and revive.

Lolita Stewart-White is a poet, playwright, and filmmaker from Liberty City, Florida. She is a Pushcart nominee and winner of the Paris American Series Prize. Her poetry has been featured in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Boston Review, and the African American Review. Her poem “Healing” was featured in the anthology This is the Honey, curated by New York Times best-selling author Kwame Alexander. Stewart-White is an alumnus of Miami City Theatre’s Homegrown Program, a playwriting development program that nurtures emerging BIPOC playwrights. She is a Cave Canem Fellows Fund Project Grantee for her play-in-verse, Liberty City Vignettes currently in development. Stewart-White has received fellowships from the South Florida Cultural Consortium, the Miami Light Project, and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Her films have been exhibited at the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival, the Seattle Black Film Festival, and the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA).

Hattie Mae Williams is a Mother and interdisciplinary artist constantly re-remembering her wild and authentic self as a form of artistic liberation and magical manifestation, for the sake of her family’s survival. Hattie Mae was born and raised in Miami Dade and has had the pleasure of escaping the Miami swamp for fifteen years to New York City where she received her BFA from The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater /Fordham University, her Masters from Goddard University in Interdisciplinary Arts, and created a site specific focused dance company The Tattooed Ballerinas 2003-2014. Her practice looks at Sites Specific Consciousness (a term she conceived & a distinction from site specific) as a component of her work’s totality. She has also stepped into the role of Movement Director for full length films in L.A and theater productions at the Actors Theater of Louisville (Brownsville Song), also in London, Washington D.C, and New York for theater productions (It Goes Unsaid).Hattie’s direction and quest is towards discovering new ways to document, film, and create oral histories that preserve social and political moments in this lifetime.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Books & Books, 265 Aragon Avenue, Coral Gables, United States

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