Controverse open mic featuring Carol Johnson

Name: Controverse open mic featuring Carol Johnson
Start: 2025-12-22T18:30:00-05:00
End: 2025-12-22T20:00:00-05:00
Location: 145 Pleasant St, 02148

Schedule

Mon Dec 22 2025 at 06:30 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

145 Pleasant St, 02148 | Malden, MA

Join your host Anna Geoffroy and house musician Ethan Mackler as we ring out 2025 with an evening of spoken word performance featuring the incredible Carol Johnson!
Doors at 6:30, cameras on at 7, everyone out of the building at 8:15. Open mic is run in rounds time permitting, bring extra material!
Venue is UMA at 145 Pleasant st in Malden. This is a televised open mic and feature with full episodes airing on public access TV and uploaded to YouTube. Talk to the producers if you’d like a clip of your performance for your socials.
Carol Johnson is a poet of remembrance, resistance, and reclamation. Born into the lineage of Jamestown, an African American town founded by her fourth great-grandfather Ervin James in South Carolina, Carol carries the oral traditions of her ancestors with reverence and fire. Her poetry is both witness and offering, rooted in the rich soil of Black southern life and the enduring legacy of the African diaspora.
Her debut poetry collection, O’Africa, threads together generations of oral wisdom, ancestral resilience, and sharecropper soil, birthing a tapestry of Pan-African memory, part poetry, part prose, that follows generations of the James family across time, memory, and place. Her poems aren’t linear; instead, they circle and spiral like gospel songs and griot tales—an embodied archive of survival, faith, and love. They remember. They reclaim.
Spoken with the Sankofa bird perched on her shoulder, weaving memory, legacy, and lyricism into every line, Carol’s work loops backward to move forward, retrieving lost histories.
Whether performing on stage or writing at her kitchen table, Carol invokes the sacred responsibility of the storyteller. Her work is especially resonant for those exploring identity, healing, and intergenerational legacy. It is a way of speaking truth and conjuring new futures from the bones of the past, creating space for what has been silenced, buried, or forgotten.