Sunday, February 6, 3pm – Poetry & Fiction
Anniversary Celebrations with SABLE LitMag and Peepal Tree Press
Peepal Tree Press celebrates 25 years of publishing Caribbean and Black British authors and SABLE LitMag, celebrates 10 years of publishing writers of colour.
Authors who have been published by these two presses come together for this special anniversary celebration and will be reading from a new anthology– Caribbean Erotic (Peepal Tree), their own collections plus selections of work from SABLE LitMag
Poets and fiction writers reading include:
Lamont B. Steptoe was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author/editor of fourteen collections of poetry and publisher/founder of Whirlwind Press. Steptoe is a Vietnam veteran, photographer and a graduate of Temple University’s School of Communications & Theater. In 2005 he was the recipient of an American Book award for his collection A Long Movie of Shadows. In 2006 he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and also inducted into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent by the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University. His work has been published in over one hundred anthologies and his most recent collections are Crowns & Halos and Oracular Rumblings & Stiltwalking.
Kamilah Aisha Moon is a recipient of several fellowships including Cave Canem, and The Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in several journals and anthologies, including SABLE LitMag, Callaloo, Temba Tupu, Essence, Bloom, Obsidian III, Mosaic, Bum Rush the Page and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. A native of Nashville, TN, currently living in Brooklyn, NY, she has written two poetry manuscripts: Intricate Beauty and She Has A Name, a collection themed around her sister’s journey living with autism. She is currently writing a novel.
Koye Oyedeji is a writer and a journalist. His short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in various books and journals including, The Fire People(1998), IC3 (Penguin 2000), Tell Tales Volume 3, (Tell Tales Books, 2001) Write Black, Write British (Hansib 2005) and Black British Aesthetics Today (Cambridge Scholars Press 2008). As a journalist he has contributed to a number of publications including New Nation, BBC Online, Arise Magazine, Darkerthanblue.com and The Nottingham Evening Post. He is a contributing editor for SABLE Litmag and teaches in the Literary Media Department at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
Kadija Sesay is the publisher of SABLE LitMag , the series editor for the Inscribe (Peepal Tree) imprint for Black British writing and an Associate Editor of Callaloo. She has edited several anthologies of work by writers of African and Asian descent, is the chair of African Writers Abroad (PEN) and chair of International PEN Women Writers Committee. She has also published poems and short stories in several journals and books in the USA, UK and Africa. One day, she might even publish her own collection! www.sablelitmag.org
Nii Ayikwei Parkes is the author of the poetry chapbooks: eyes of a boy, lips of a man (1999), M is for Madrigal (2004) and Ballast (2009), an imagination of the slave trade by balloon and a novel Tail of the Blue Bird. Nii is Senior Editor at flipped eye publishing. He has held writer in residence positions at The Poetry Café, BBC Radio 3, and has held visiting positions at the Universities of Southampton and California State. His latest poetry collection is The Makings of You (Peepal Tree).www.niiparkes.com
Jacqueline Johnson is the author of “A Gathering of Mother Tongues” White Pine Press in 1998 and the winner of the Third Annual White Pine Press Poetry Award. She is also the author of “Stokely Carmichael: The Story of Black Power. She has received several awards and published widely in anthologies and journals which have recently included, Callaloo, Temba Tupu: African American Women’s Poetry, Calabash, Def Poetry Jam, Streetlights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience and Textural Rhythms: Quilting the Jazz Tradition.
Christine Lewis, native of Trinidad and Tobago is a Free-lance journalist and reporter with People’s Production House in New York City. Activist, Poet, and Pannist whose study of Afro-cuban dance keeps her on her toes. Christine is also an avid knitter.
Malachi is a fellow of the University of Miami’s Mitchner Caribbean Writer’s Institute and an alumnus of Florida International University, Miami-Dade College and Jamaica School of Drama. Malachi won the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission most outstanding writer in the poetry category for 2009. He headlined the International Dub-Poetry Festival in Toronto and he performed at the Love-In Festival in Miami with Richie Havens and other greats. Malachi’s new CD “Hail to Jamaica” will be released later this year. www.malachismith.com
