Haymarket Books, Bowery Poetry, and The BreakBeat Poets present: Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight
Krista Franklin will be joined by special guests Aricka Foreman, and avery r. young, for an event to launch her new book Too Much Midnight hosted by Mahogany L. Browne
While this event is free for all to attend, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to support the work of these artists. All donations received will be shared between the performers.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1460-too-much-midnight
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Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight draws on Pan African histories, Black Surrealism, Afrofuturism, pop culture, art history, and the historical and present-day micro-to-macro violence inflicted upon Black people and other people of color, working to forge imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions of liberation.
Featuring 30 poems, 30 artworks, an author statement and an interview, Too Much Midnight chronicles the intersections between art and life, art and writing, the historical and the speculative, cultural and personal identity, the magical and the mundane.
GET THE BOOK FROM HAYMARKET BOOKS
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Krista Franklin is a writer and visual artist whose work has appeared in Poetry, The Offing, Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, BOMB Magazine, Encyclopedia, Vol. F-K and L-Z, and the anthologies The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Gathering Ground. Her chapbook of poems, Study of Love & Black Body, was published by Willow Books in 2012.
Aricka Foreman is an American poet, essayist and digital curator from Detroit, MI. Author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber, and Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books), she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in RHINO, Buzzfeed, James Franco Review, THRUSH and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press) among others. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Offing, and spends her time in Chicago, IL experimenting with photography & video-narratives.
Interdisciplinary artist avery r. young is a 3Arts Award winning teaching artist, composer and producer with work that spans the genres of music, performance, visual arts and literature. Examining and celebrating Black American history and culture, his work also focuses in the areas of social justice, equity, queer identity, misogyny, and body consciousness. As a writer, this Cave Canem alum has work featured in The Breakbeat Poets, Coon Bidness, to be left with the body, and Make Magazine. He has also written curriculum and essays on arts education that appear in the Teaching Artist Journal and A.I.M. Print. His first book neckbone (Northwestern University Press) was released in June 2019.
Mahogany L. Browne is the Executive Director of Bowery Poetry, Artistic Director of Urban Word NYC, and Poetry Coordinator at St. Francis College. She holds fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, and Rauschenberg. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, Black Girl Magic, Kissing Caskets, and Dear Twitter, and a co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left. @haymarketbooks
Bowery Poetry is a spoken word poetry & reading venue located at 308 Bowery NYC supporting poets, music, open mic, and other live performance arts in the heart of the East Village, New York City. @bowerypoetry
The BreakBeat Poets series is committed to work that brings the aesthetic of hip-hop practice to the page. These books are a cipher for the fresh, with an eye always to the next. We strive to center and showcase some of the most exciting voices in literature, art, and culture. @breakbeatpoets
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“Krista Franklin is for grown folks only. Too Much Midnight is a brilliant synthesis of her stunning and wildly influential visual art with a series of poems that wrench at the gut of you. This is truth-telling in the vein of Nelson Algren and Patricia Smith, poetry from heavy and dark places-- dark like blood, dark like midnight, dark like obsidian stone, like ‘blue-black everything.’”
—Eve L. Ewing, author of 1919
