Brian Gyamfi: Poetry Reading + Conversation

Name: Brian Gyamfi: Poetry Reading + Conversation
Start: 2025-09-30T18:00:00-04:00
Location: 428 W. Main St, Brighton, MI, United States, Michigan 48116

Schedule

Tue, 30 Sep, 2025 at 06:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

428 W. Main St, Brighton, MI, United States, Michigan 48116 | Brighton, MI

Please join us as we welcome Brian Gyamfi to the bookshop! He will be in conversation with Dandy Team Member Coco as well as reading from his new book, What Gods in the Kingdom of Bastards. There is no cost to attend, but your registration is exceedingly helpful in our planning. We will have copies of this book on hand, but to ensure stock, it is highly recommended that you reserve your copy ahead of time. You can order the book and register for the event by going to: https://2dandelionsbookshop.com/event/2025-09-30/brian-gyamfi-poetry-reading-conversation
Brian Gyamfi is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Zell Fellowship, and two Hopwood Awards. A finalist for the Oxford Poetry Prize and the Poetry International Prize, his writing has appeared in POETRY, Narrative, Guernica, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He serves as a contributing editor at Oxford Poetry. Gyamfi lives in Washington, DC.
What God in the Kingdom of Bastards is a poetic exploration of grief, memory, Blackness, and the haunting legacy of familial trauma by way of colonialism, told through the lens of two brothers: Lot, the elder, who is flesh and alive, and Frank, the younger, a ghost navigating his post-suicide existence. Their relationship anchors the collection, weaving themes of love, loss, and the arduous reconciliation between the living and the dead. Combining vivid imagery with fragmented, conversational tones of prayers, laments, and whispered confessions that are surreal and lyrical, Gyamfi delves into the ways trauma--both personal and systemic--permeates family, faith, and identity.