Join us for the January kick-off of What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series with Bonita Lee Penn and Vievee Francis!

Bonita Lee Penn is the author of When the Trees Finally Testify (Get Fresh Books, 2024), Every Morning a Foot is Looking for My Neck (Central Square Press, 2019), and contributor to Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience (Cherry Castle Publishing, 2022). Her work has appeared in The Skinny Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, JOINT. Literary Magazine, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and more. Bonita serves on the Board of the Sweetwater Center for the Arts and is a Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Fellow. She is the recipient of the Advancing Black Arts Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation to produce her poetic stage performance, Gospel in the Wake (June 2025). Bonita also facilitates a poetry workshop with Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University and is Managing Editor of the Soul Pitt Quarterly Magazine.

Vievee Francis is the author of: The Shared World (2023); Forest Primeval, winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly. Her work has appeared widely. Francis wrote the libretto for the transdisciplinary opera, The Ritual of Breath. She has received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and has also been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and Kresge Fellowship. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Registration is quick and easy at bit.ly/WTUIJan2025