Two luminous, acclaimed poet-educators join us for our May Gathering.

Amanda Johnston is a nationally renowned poet, perform and educator. A Cave Canem Fellow and Affrilachian poet, Johnston was named one of Blavity’s 13 Black Poets You Should Know. The author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press), Amanda is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, a cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, founder / executive director of Torch Literary Arts, and serves on the Cave Canem Foundation board of directors. Amanda’s work has been featured on Bill Moyers, the Poetry Society of America’s online series In Their Own Words, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous anthologies, as well as online and print publications such as, Callaloo and Poetry.

Sequoia Maner is a poet-scholar and Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University. She earned her B.A. in English from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Texas at Austin. She is co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, due from Routledge Press in October. You can read her essay about Beyoncé’s Lemonade in the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and her poem “upon reading the autopsy of Sandra Bland,” finalist for the 2017 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, in Obsidian: Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora.