chimeful poemhood: A Literary Circle + Poetry Workshop

This event is FREE but donations are strongly encouraged to help us continue this important work!

651 ARTS is thrilled to partner with The Free Black Women's Library to bring you chimeful poemhood: A Literary Circle + Poetry Workshop.

Facilitated by renowed poet literary, theorist, and professor, Rosamond S. King, this literary workshop will explore the profound writings of Gwendolyn Brooks and reflect on how her work remains relevant today.

Participants will then compose and share poetry of their own. This workshop will also offer space for Black expressive resistance and imagination, exploring how Black poetry and literature bring new perspectives to narratives and stories relevant to the community.

Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most profound poets and authors of the 20th century. Born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, she migrated to Chicago, where she documented the lives and dynamics of the Black people who also called the city home. Brooks is the first among the choral ancestral and contemporary Black voices included in this season's upcoming piece, Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends. In this workshop, writer Rosamond S. King will guide attendees to engage Brooks’ writing found in the performance and reflect on its contemporary relevance before they compose poetry of their own.

Photo Credit: Bettmann / Getty

This workshop is Part Two of Community Fly Zone Workshops, a series of workshops in collaboration with André M. Zachery, Artistic Director of Renegade Performance Group & Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, Lead Architect of DuSable City. This series aims to encourage introspection, uplift key historical figures, and honor the abundance of ways Black masculinity exists today through movement, film, and poetry. Community Fly Zone Workshops leads up to the World Premiere of Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends in January 2025.

Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Urban Legends is a solo performance that uses movement to explore the self-examination of Black masculinity through history, memory, text, poetry, and geography. It is a personal narrative that begins with Zachery’s youth in 1980-90’s Chicago and intersects with three legendary figures: Fred Hampton, Ben (Benji) Wilson, and Harold Washington. Guided in part by the oracular voice of Chicago ancestor and Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, the performer grapples with the legacy of these three men – a revolutionary, an athletic phenomenon and a post-Civil Rights era politician, all viewed in their primes as messiahs.

"Against Gravity: Community Fly Zone Workshop Series" is funded by a 2024 Brooklyn Arts Fund grant through the Brooklyn Arts Council awarded to André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group

Signing up for chimeful poemhood: A Literary Circle + Poetry Workshop enrolls you into the 651 ARTS email list so you can learn about more events like this.

Photo Credit: New York University

Writer and performer Rosamond S. King is the author of poetry collections and the Lambda Award-winning . Her poems have also been published in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies, including , , and . She has read, performed, and taught around the world, including Poets House, the Bocas Literary Festival, and the African Performance Art Biennial. www.rosamondSking.black

Photo Credit: Tara Lynn Pixley

André M. Zachery, artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Renegade Performance Group, is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, researcher, and technologist with a BFA from Ailey/Fordham University and an MFA in Performance & Interactive Media Arts from CUNY/Brooklyn College. His practice, research, and community engagement artistically focused on merging choreography, technology, and Black/African Diaspora cultural practices through multimedia work. His works have been presented domestically and internationally, receiving support through several residencies, awards, and commissions. André is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Gregory Millard Fellow in Choreography, a 2019 Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Choreography, and an Assistant Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts in the Dance Department at NYU.

Photo Credit: Shantre Pinkney

3rd culture seed of two Caribbeans --- one born in the 1st surviving republic in the Western Hemisphere to throw off the yoke of slavery, the other in a colony, Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (Ayinsko: he\they\li) does what it takes, using voice to shift culture, engaging with communities of listening, memory-making, and movement.

Disciple of Kamau Brathwaite, Ayinsko is a sanba/ keeper of memory, whose modal practice shifts as needed -- the participatory media project DuSable City, the online creative sousou Someplace Like Home, the experi(m)ent(i)al podcapsule trance-mission DrumLanguage (2013-16), occasional acts of journalism.

Over the past decade this work has been supported by City Lore, Chicago Community Trust, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, THREAD at Yale, City Bureau, CCCADI, Voqal, & the Center for Cultural Power.

Ayinsko has also served as multiformat arts presenter with The Brooklyn Museum, Haiti Cultural Exchange, City Lore, the DuSable Museum, Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, The Bowery Poetry Club, The Franke Center for the Arts & more, as well as in advisory & solidarity roles with Let Us Breathe Collective & Honey Pot Performance.

 @Ayinsko, anywhere

@DuSableCity, right here

Since its founding in 1988, 651 ARTS has become a trusted convener of contemporary African Diasporic artistic expression, a champion and nurturer for emerging artists and their work and a vital cultural resource for its surrounding community. As it moves forward, part of 651 ARTS’ mission is to preserve the legacy of Black culture in Brooklyn, celebrate the eclecticism of Black performance and to pioneer new visions of African Diaspora artists. This year – the transition year – is integral for the institution as it continues to lay the framework that will further help to reinforce 651 ARTS’ role as a leader of African Diasporic culture while also establishing it an incubator for artistic innovation in the 21st century.

Renegade Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based dance company creating innovative artistic projects grounded in Black and African Diaspora aesthetics and expressions through theatrical, immersive and site-specific performance as well as film, multimedia and technology.

The Free Black Women’s Library is a Black Feminist/Womanist Social Art Project based in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. It serves as a social art project featuring a collection of over five thousand books written by Black women and Black non-binary writers, a free store, a period pantry, a virtual Reading Club, a weekly book swap, and a wide array of workshops and free public programs.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Free Black Women’s Library, 226 Marcus Garvey Boulevard, Brooklyn, United States