Kwoya Fagin Maples: Poetry Reading & Signing

Itinerant Literate is pleased to partner with Nidum Studios to host Charleston-native Kwoya Fagin Maples for a poetry reading celebrating the publication of her most recent poetry collection, Long Eye. In these poems, steeped in myth and local color, the author explores writing, parenthood, and the Atlantic waters of the Lowcountry.

After the reading, the author will be available for signing and copies of the book will be available for purchase. Light refreshments will be provided.

Attendees are encouraged to stick around after the reading to view the gallery's current exhibit, Field Notes. In Field Notes: Studies in Form and Feeling, three painters, Anne Abreve, Demetrius Bing, Beth Northcut Williams, and two ceramicists, Ashley Perez and Jim Sweeney, share deeply personal yet open-ended works of abstract art. Their pieces speak to grief, joy, memory, and lived experience, but they leave space for something essential... you.

In Long Eye, Kwoya Fagin Maples brings us a sea-bound collection that channels the mythic, defiant voice of a Black Mermaid.

Inspired by Mami Wata, a water spirit of West African folklore, Maples explores the power and divinity of being a Black woman, a mother, a thinker, a protector, and creator. The poems emerge from a neurodivergent mind navigating writing, parenthood, and the Atlantic waters of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The sea and its many creatures serve as guides—for survival, resistance, and transformation.

As she explores the intersection of science, poetry, and mythology, Maples also seeks to depict Black familial bonds in societies structured against them. Woven through the book is the voice of the mermaid, reminding us that “every underwater being exists in relation.”

At turns wonderstruck and irreverent, these poems pulse with human longing. Maples is a poet whose work is both musical and meticulous. Her eye somehow equally trained on the world at large and her own inner workings. The result is an astonishing, immersive experience.

Kwoya Fagin Maples is a poet, woodworker and teacher of creative writing. A Charleston, SC native, her creative practice spans both literary and visual arts. She is the author of Long Eye, forthcoming from Hub City Press 2026; Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018) and coeditor of I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Maples’s debut collection, Mend, received a 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Finalist Award for Poetry. Maples is a graduate Cave Canem Fellow.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Nidum Studios, 2154 Noisette Boulevard, North Charleston, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

Get App