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Chavonn Williams Shen: Readings and Conversations!with Carolyn Holbrook and Gen Del Raye
East Side Freedom Library
1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul, MN 55106
Thursday, February 27, 2025, 7:00 p.m.
Join the East Side Freedom Library for a reading from Chavonn Williams Shen and her guests Carolyn Holbrook and Gen Del Raye.
Chavonn’s first collection of poetry, Still Life with Rope and River explores racism through a chorus of voices surrounding Emmett Till’s murder. Through research in combination with emotional truth, Williams Shen uses persona poems to dive deep into the psyche of both common and lesser known people and objects regarding Till’s lynching. Williams Shen also weaves in their own narrative and family history of how Blackness is dissected and dismissed, illustrating how the past is a ghost to the present.
Chavonn Williams Shen (she/they) is from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was a 2022 McKnight Writing fellow and a first runner-up for The Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Contest. She was also a Best of the Net Award finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a winner of the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series, a fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, and an instructor for the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. A Bread Loaf, Tin House, VONA, and Hurston/Wright workshop alum, her writing has appeared in: Diode, Anomaly, AGNI, and others. Her debut book, Still Life with Rope and River, is published by Finishing Line Press.
Carolyn Holbrook is founder and Artistic/Executive Director of More Than a Single Story. Her memoir, Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify, won the 2021 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. She is co-editor with David Mura of the anthology, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World (Minn 2021), and is co-author with Arleta Little of civil rights icon, Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s memoir, Hope In the Struggle (Minn 2019) and Ordinary People, Extraordinary Journeys: How the St. Paul Companies Leadership Initiatives in Neighborhoods Program Changed Lives and Communities (2015). Her essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (MNHS 2015) and A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (MNHS 2016). Her TEDx talk, “The Life you Live is the Legacy You will Leave” was presented at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN (2022).
Gen Del Raye is half Japanese and was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan. His writing has appeared in the Gettysburg Review and Poetry Northwest, among others, and has been anthologized in The Best Small Fictions 2017 and Best New Poets 2019. His debut collection of short stories, Boundless Deep, and Other Stories, won the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and is available from the University of Nebraska Press.
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE FOR THE CAUSE OF SOLIDARITY!
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1105 Greenbrier St, Saint Paul, MN, United States, Minnesota 55106
