october, 2024
Event Details
The Writer´s League of Texas is thrilled to partner with Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston on a series of events in Fall 2024, “Praisesong for the People: Poems Celebrating Everyday Texans.”
On Wednesday, October 30, we’ll be in Dallas at The Wild Detectives with a stellar line-up of poets, including Kendra Allen, Logan Cure, Mag Gabbert, Sebastian H. Páramo, Nomi Stone, April Sojourner Truth Walker, Joaquín Zihuatanejo, and more. This program is in collaboration with The Writer’s Garret.
Join us for a special evening featuring poets from the project celebrating the people who make our communities a place to call home. The program will be introduced by WLT Executive Director Becka Oliver and hosted by Amanda Johnston and will include readings and conversation. This event is free and open to all.
About Amanda Johnston and Praisesong for the People:
The current Texas Poet Laureate, Amanda Johnston is a writer and artist. She is the author of the collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press, 2017). She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, American Short Fiction, The Watermill Center, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a member of Affrilachian Poets, the cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and the founder and executive director of Torch Literary Arts.
Through her project, Praisesong for the People: Poems Celebrating the Heart and Soul of Texas, Amanda Johnston will commission seventy poets across seven regions of the state to write poems celebrating everyday Texans. The project seeks to uplift the intersecting population across generational, gender, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, differently abled, and immigrant communities. Johnston will also share resources with K–12 educators to encourage students to read and write praise poems.
Featured Presenters:
Amanda Johnston is a writer, artist, and the 2024 Texas Poet Laureate. Born in East St. Louis, IL, and raised in Austin, TX, she began writing poetry while living in Kentucky. Her writing is published widely, and she has presented at numerous literary conferences and events.She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, and the anthologies, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founder of Torch Literary Arts. Named one of Blavity’s “13 Black Poets You Should Know,” Amanda’s work has been featured on Bill Moyers, the Poetry Society of America’s series In Their Own Words, The Moth Radio Hour, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. She was commissioned to curate a collection of poems for the Poetry Coalition on the theme Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body.She has facilitated creative writing workshops and presented at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Hugo House, Langston Hughes House, Frye Museum, Carver Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Prizer Arts and Letters, NeoSoul Poetry Lounge, Nuyorican Poet’s Café, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pillsbury House Theater, Rude Mechanical Theater, and at numerous universities and literary venues across the country.Amanda Johnston is the creator of the genesis – a poetic form comprised of seven poems. Five individual poems in columns create a sixth prose poem when read left to right, and italicized words that create the final seventh poem when read independently as a visible erasure.
Mag Gabbert is the author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, which won the Charles B. Wheeler Prize in Poetry; the chapbook The Breakup, which won the Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Award; and the chapbook Minml Poems. Her work can also be found in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, Copper Nickel, Guernica, Poetry Daily, and in many other journals and magazines. Mag is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Idyllwild Arts, and Poetry at Round Top. She has an MFA from UC Riverside and a PhD from Texas Tech; she currently teaches at Southern Methodist University and serves as the 2024-2026 Poet Laureate for the city of Dallas, Texas.
