An Evening with Morgan Parker and Lynne Thompson

Name: An Evening with Morgan Parker and Lynne Thompson
Start: 2024-11-15T19:00:00-06:00
Location: George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center

Schedule

Fri Nov 15 2024 at 07:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center | Austin, TX

Join us for a soul-stirring evening of poetry and verse with poet, essayist, and novelist Morgan Parker and Los Angeles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson.
Light reception provided by Mashae's Catering.

Click here for FREE RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1071060774609?aff=oddtdtcreator

In Morgan Parker's You Get What You Pay For and Lynne Thompson's Blue on a Blue Palette, the historical experiences of Black women drive the two writers' explorations. Morgan's essays, deeply intimate, witty, and personal, trace her experience in therapy as a way to examine racial consciousness and how America's cultural history has affected Black women in particular. Thompson's collection of poems, rooted in the jazz tradition and encompassing various shades of blue, traverses the multiplicities within the condition of women throughout history. These writers deconstruct what it means to survive and find joy within landscapes that threaten.

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” Parker’s debut book of nonfiction, You Get What You Pay For, was published in March 2024.

Lynne Thompson served as Los Angeles’ 4th Poet Laureate and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press); Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield; and,, Blue on a Blue Palette, published by BOA Editions in April 2024. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series (Kenya) and the Vermont Studio Center. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review,, Copper Nickel, and Gulf Coast, as well as the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa, among others.

Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Torch has featured work by Colleen J. McElroy, Tayari Jones, Sharon Bridgforth, Crystal Wilkinson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, and others. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.

This event was made possible with support from the City of Austin Cultural Arts Division, the Burdine Johnson Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Carver Museum.