WRB Presents | March 2025

The WRB Presents the next in a regular series of readings attracting and spotlighting literary talent in Washington, D.C., hosted by Michael Barron, Lauren Cerand, and Chris McCaffery. On the evening of March 12, these four writers will read from their work:

• V Efua Prince, a writer, artist, and professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. Previously a fellow at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Center, her work seeks to transform the history of black women into political art and to unpack the dynamics of black family life. Kin: Practically True Stories was published last year. Laundry—a book that explores laundry as metonymy in order to understand critical aspects of African American women’s historical relationship to home, family, work, and industry—is forthcoming. She is the co-author of Crazy As Hell: The Best Little Guide to Black History (2024), with Hoke Glover III.
• Lisa Russ Spaar, a poet and writer. The author of several acclaimed collections of poetry, including Madrigalia: New and Selected Poems, her most recent book Paradise Close is also her first novel. Spaar is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and her work has appeared in places such as the New Yorker, the Poetry Foundation, and the Yale Review. She teaches creative writing at UVA.
• Collette Shade, the author of Y2K: How The 2000's Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was). The book is history-in-essays of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and was released by Dey Street, an imprint of HarperCollins, in January 2025.
• Ryan Alexander, a writer, critic, and cohost of Vollmannia, a podcast about the work of William Vollmann. He tweets about literature under the handle @ryanalexanderplatz and is working on his first novel. 

Host or Publisher Washington Review of Books