About this Event
Presented by the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) at the University of Pittsburgh.
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National Poetry Series winners MaKshya Tolbert, author of Shade is a place (Penguin Poets, 2025), and Kira Tucker, author of Wildest (Akashic Books, 2026) will give a reading and join in conversation around lyric eco-poetics, the Black self and Black geographies, and the act of confronting the contemporary moment(s) through their craft. There will be a book signing to follow.
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MaKshya Tolbert practices poetry and placemaking in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. She is the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, and co-stewards Fernland Studios, an open-ended studio insistent on rest, rejuvenation, and reciprocity as a core compositional practice. Tolbert was the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship Guest Curator, and served as 2024-25 Chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission. She has received fellowship and residency support from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, New City Arts, Community of Writers, and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Her recent poetry and prose can be found at Poem-a-Day, Emergence Magazine, West Branch, Poets for Science, and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Gastronomic Sciences.
Kira Tucker is the author of the National Poetry Series-winning collection Wildest, forthcoming from Akashic Books in December 2026. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Northwestern University, where she currently teaches as an Artist in Residence. Her work appears in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, the Iowa Review, Callaloo, and elsewhere. A former managing editor of TriQuarterly, Tucker was a finalist for a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Wildest is her debut collection.
Event venue & nearby stays
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, 650 Schenley Drive, Pittsburgh, United States
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