Last Sunday Poetry Reading and Open Mic
Presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington
Followed by an Open Mic
It’s all free!
Free parking in the back too.
Maria Hamilton Abegunde writes poetry because it can and does change the world. Abegunde is an ancestral priest in the Yoruba Orisa tradition, a memory keeper, and Reiki Master with a focus on the recovery and healing of memory from sentient bodies. Her research and creative work focus on transgenerational trauma and community healing through contemplative practices. Excerpts from The Ariran’s Last Life, a Middle Passage memory-work, have been published in Let Spirit Speak!, Best African American Fiction, and The Kenyon Review. Essays have been featured in The Journal for Liberal Arts and Sciences, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and nocturnes. Commissioned poems were featured in Keeper of My Mothers’ Dreams, a collaborative community exhibition. Excerpts from Learning to Eat the Dead were selected as a COG poetry finalist and will be featured in an upcoming issue of Tupelo Quarterly. She is a Cave Canem, Ragdale, Sacatar, and NEH fellow. She directs The Graduate Mentoring Center and is a visiting faculty member in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.
Breon Rochelle Tyler is L-O-V-E, her Pop-Pop’s namesake tapping rhythms into the 
sheets and bed where he savored his last breaths. Her birth was to be acknowledged. So God sent down snow in the middle of April in Virginia. She was crafted to be an anomaly—not abnormal, but a beautiful deviation from the norm. She makes art, cooks, bakes, dances, and laughs, among other things. May she speak what she is: LOVE. Light. Om. Victory. Evocation of the Life Force that connects and sustains all living beings. Amen. Ase (ah-shay).