Join us on Zoom for our monthly virtual Open Mic. Hosted by poet Nia McAllister, participate in an evening of spoken word, featuring amazing local, national, and international poets. All are welcome to either perform or just watch.

All interested performers, sign up to read using this form.

Audience members, join this zoom link to attend.

Our Featured Poet:

reelaviolette botts-ward is a homegirl, an artist, and a nontraditional community curator from Philadelphia, PA. Currently a Lecturer of African American Studies at Merritt College and doctoral candidate in African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores Black women's healing spaces in Oakland as sites of radical self-making and spiritual reclamation. As founder of blackwomxnhealing, ree curates healing circles, exhibitions, courses, and research for and by Black womxn. She remains invested in making her academic work accessible to community audiences, using art and poetry as tools of translation. Her first book, mourning my inner[blackgirl]child (Nomadic Press, 2021), uses poetics as praxis to explore ancestral grief work, spiritual gifts, and embodied modes of diasporic healing. Her work has been featured with platforms like Elle Magazine, The Griot, and the NAACP, and supported by the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, among others. For more on ree’s work, visit blackwomxnhealing.com / @blackwomxnhealing / @reelaviolette on instagram.

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