Join McNally Jackson Independent Booksellers for an evening of readings and thought, curated by Shamar Hill. Drinks and socializing to follow in the bar. RSVP required.

Enzo Silon Surin (Poetry, 2012) is a Haitian-born, award-winning poet, educator, librettist, publisher and social advocate. He is the author of four collections of poetry, including American Scapegoat (Black Lawrence Press, May 2023), which interrogates the socio-political framework of a democracy at war with itself and its humanity, and When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (2020), winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Awards for Poetry. He is co-editor of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience (Cherry Castle Publishing, 2022), and the recipient of a number of honors including a Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation and grants from the New England Poetry Club and Chateau d’Orquevaux in France. Surin’s work has been featured in numerous publications including by the Poetry Foundation and in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets and has been commissioned by the Boston Opera Collaborative. He is Founding Editor and Publisher at Central Square Press and Founder/Executive Director at the Faraday Publishing Company, Inc., a nonprofit literary services and social advocacy organization.

Shamar Hill, a Black and Jewish writer, is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Fine Arts Work Center. He has been published in the American Poetry Review, the Missouri Review, Washington Square Review, and Poetry Northwest, among others. He is working on his memoir, In Defiance of All True Things, and a poetry collection, Photographs of an Imagined Childhood.

Martha Collins recently published her eleventh collection of poetry, Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022), and her fifth volume of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, Dreaming the Mountain, poems by Tue Sy (Milkweed, 2023). Her tenth book of poems, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award; earlier books, which have won several awards, include three focusing on race and racism (Admit One: An American Scrapbook, White Papers, Blue Front). Collins founded the U.Mass. Boston creative writing program and served for ten years as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin.