About this Event
What better way to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day than with a conversation between two masterful writers? Join us for a conversation between Nailah Mathews and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in celebration of the launch of Mathews' chapbook, better hands.
Who breaks the cycle, and what does breaking it cost? Winner of the 2023 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, Nailah Mathews is the author of better hands. Mathews guides readers across and through “the infinity pink” in poems that drip a reverence tinged with resentment. Their debut chapbook engages myth, nature, and the body to honor the past and summon uncertain, ecstatic futures beyond.
Nailah Mathews is a Brooklyn-based Black poet to whom books and Black lives matter. Their body of work is preoccupied with matrilineal trauma, queerness, uncanny Black girlhood, racial isolation, radical theology, and decolonization. When not writing, they are either ankle deep in other people’s stories or wrangling Olive and Martini, their two very bad cats. You can read more of their work at nailahwritesnovels.com.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was raised in Spring Valley, New York, and now lives in the Bronx. His debut collection, Friday Black, was a New York Times bestseller, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. His first novel Chain-Gang All-Stars was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and selected as a New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year. Adjei-Brenyah is a National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ honoree.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Liz's Book Bar, 315 Smith Street, Brooklyn, United States
USD 11.49
