Celebrate JUNETEENTH with poet & author CHET'LA SEBREE, in conversation with Clare Beams
Schedule
Fri, 19 Jun, 2026 at 06:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
1302 N 3rd St, Harrisburg, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 17102 | Harrisburg, PA
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“Feeling like an outsider doesn’t land the same when you’re lost on roads you know, ones with which you should be familiar.”—Chet’la SebreeFRIDAY, JUNE 19TH AT 6PM
FREE EVENT * RSVP at https://tinyurl.com/3rdInTheBurg-June2026
The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is honored to host author, poet, and scholar Chet’la Sebree on Friday, June 19, 2026, to celebrate the release of her evocative, compelling essay collection, TURN (W)HERE. Sebree will be in conversation with novelist and poet Clare Beams. This Mainstage program will begin at 6pm and launches our Third Fridays author series.
Chet’la Sebree is the author of Blue Opening, longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, Field Study, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary WorkPoetry. Her essays and poems have been anthologized in Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, Kwame Alexander’s This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, and others. Sebree is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University.
Where are you from? Where do you call home? Where, if anywhere, do you belong?
We have all asked ourselves these questions as we move through the world, searching for ourselves, our people, and a place that is uniquely ours. Chet’la Sebree’s Turn (W)here: A Geography of Home is an innovative and probing collection of essays in which the lauded poet interrogates these universal questions by looking at her own relationship to home, inheritance, and belonging as she traverses the world as a single, queer, Black, chronically ill American woman.
At the age of eighteen Sebree began, as she writes, “perfecting the art of leaving.” After moving out of her parents’ house for college, she rarely kept the same address for more than two years—bouncing from city to city, country to country, perpetually in search of her next adventure. For Sebree, traveling has been a life-long passion—but there was always an ache of not feeling quite at home. After years of exploring, she desired to put down roots in a place not just for her, but also a future child as she embarked on a solo fertility journey. But where could home be for a Black woman in an America that has always had a fraught relationship with its Black citizens—a country fracturing at every turn?
In a time when so many of us are struggling to find where we belong, Sebree’s quest for home, with clear-eyed observations and fearless revelations, will surely resonate with readers on their own searches. With essays that combine intimate storytelling, lyric meditation, rigorous research, cultural criticism, and genre-defying structure, Sebree brings her full range of expertise—writer, scholar, poet, and professor—to bear, as she navigates her relationship to a country that was not made for her to survive, let alone thrive. Through her many travels—road trips across multiple states, periods in cities across the U.S. where work and curiosity brought her, stints in countries not her own—she dreams of new futures and comes to realize that for her, and many of us, home isn’t a place but a set of circumstances that allows us to become our fullest selves.
In Conversation With...
Clare Beams is the author of the novel The Garden, published by Doubleday in 2024. It was longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize and a featured selection at LitHub. Her novel The Illness Lesson, published in February of 2020 by Doubleday, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was named a best book of 2020 by Esquire and Bustle and a best book of February by Time, O Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. Her story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, was published by Lookout Books in 2016; it won the Bard Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Story Prize, and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, Conjunctions, The Common, Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has received special mention in The Pushcart Prize and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, MacDowell, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize. Clare lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters and currently teaches in the Randolph MFA program.
FREE EVENT * RSVP at https://tinyurl.com/3rdInTheBurg-June2026
Where to park:
FREE PARKING is available in the bookstore's dedicated parking lot behind the store, as well as around the neighboring Broad Street Market and in the municipal lot at 6th and Verbeke Streets. Metered street parking is available on the ParkMobile app.
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Where is it happening?
1302 N 3rd St, Harrisburg, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 17102Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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