Michael Twitty
Keynote Speaker
Michael W. Twitty is a culinary historian and food writer living in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He blogs at Afroculinaria.com. He’s appeared on Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern, Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates and most recently Taste the Nation with Top Chef’s Padma Lakshmi. HarperCollins released Twitty’s The Cooking Gene, in 2017, tracing his ancestry through food from Africa to America and from slavery to freedom, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize and The Art of Eating Prize and a 3rd place winner of Barnes & Noble’s Discover New Writer’s Awards in Nonfiction. The Cooking Gene won the 2018 James Beard Award for best writing as well as book of the year, making him the first Black author so awarded. His piece on visiting Ghana in Bon Appetit was included in Best Food Writing in 2019 and was nominated for a 2019 James Beard Award. His next book, Rice, a New York Times noted cookbook, became available through UNC Press in 2021. KosherSoul, his follow-up to The Cooking Gene, was published in August 2022 through HarperCollins and received the 2022 National Jewish Book Award. Michael has a hit spice line based on The Cooking Gene and a recent special guest appearance on Michelle Obama’s Waffles and Mochi show on Netflix. Michael can also be found on MasterClass online, where he teaches Tracing Your Roots Through Food. Michael is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED fellow and a member of the 2022 TIME 100 Next class. He served as a historical consultant on the FX adaptation of Octavia Butler’s “Kindred.”
Prentis Hemphill
Keynote Speaker
Prentis Hemphill (they/them) is a political organizer and was the Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network. They are the author of What It Takes To Heal and an expert embodiment practitioner who has partnered with Brené Brown and Esther Perel, among others. Their work focuses on dismantling systems of oppression and fostering inclusive communities. With a deep understanding of intersectionality, Hemphill has a remarkable ability to connect with diverse audiences and has worked with individuals and organizations to navigate leadership transitions, support community accountability, and inspire transformation.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs Gumbs
Keynote Speaker
Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre
Lorde is a queer Black feminist love evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life.
Publisher’s Weekly calls her writing “groundbreaking.” She is also the author of four
earlier books aka portable textual ceremonies, including Undrowned which won the
2022 Whiting Award in Non-Fiction. A recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize in
Poetry, the National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a National
Humanities Center Fellowship, Dr. Gumbs lives and loves in Durham, North Carolina.
www.alexispauline.com
Justin Reynolds
Justin A. Reynolds is the author of Opposite of Always, an Indies Introduce Top Ten Debut translated into 20 languages, and currently in film development by Paramount Players. His sophomore novel, Early Departures, earned four starred reviews, was a Kirkus Best of 2020, and was hailed by Kirkus as a story "not to be missed" and Booklist as a "virtuoso masterpiece". His Marvel graphic novel featuring Brooklyn’s Spider-Man, Miles Morales: Shock Waves, was an ABA Indie Bestseller, and is the bestselling Marvel graphic novel of all time.
In 2023, he co-edited a novel-in-stories entitled House Party, a collaboration showcasing the work of ten of the most esteemed YA authors in publishing. In 2023, justin was the 18th recipient of the annual Denise McCoy Legacy Award for most humorous children's literature contribution, winning the honor for his bestselling MG novel, It's the End of the World and I'm in My Bathing Suit. justin is also the co-founder of the CLE Reads Book Festival and has contributed to several acclaimed young adult and middle grade anthologies, including the instant New York Times #1 bestseller, Black Boy Joy.
Ladee Hubbard Hubbard
Ladee Hubbard is the author of, most recently, the story collection The Last Suspicious Holdout (2023) as well as two novels: The Talented Ribkins which received the 2017 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the 2018 Hurston-Wright Award for Debut Fiction, and The Rib King (2021). She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, The Berlin Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship (2022), and a Scholar of Note residency at The American Library in Paris. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly and Callaloo among other venues. She received a BA in English from Princeton University, a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Born in Massachusetts and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida, she currently lives in New Orleans.
Airea D. Matthews
Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification, through a personal lens. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Matthews earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. From 2022-2023 she served as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College where she directs the poetry program.
Phillip B. Williams
Phillip B. Williams is the author of the debut novel Ours, and the collections Mutiny, winner of the 2022 American Book Award, and Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn. Williams’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at Randolph College’s low-res MFA.
Tiana Clark
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize.
She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Clark is the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women’s studies.
Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters and is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Clark is currently working on her next two books, Begging to be Saved, a memoir-in-essays reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and what lies on the other side of survival; and Proof, a poetry collection, tracing the complexities of relationship beginnings and endings, loneliness, desire, and joy.
Alicia D. Williams
Alicia D. Williams is an award-winning author of books that offer understanding, empathy, hope, and inspiration. The New York Times praised Genesis Begins Again as a “stunning debut novel… reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” and it received the Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe Award for New Talent, Kirkus Prize Finalist, and William C. Morris Prize Finalist Awards. It also appeared on numerous ‘best-of’ lists, choice awards, and Battle of the Books.
Her newest book Mid-Air is tells the story of how a tender-souled boy reeling from the death of his best friend struggles to fit into a world that wants him to grow up tough and unfeeling. Williams’ picture books, Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston and Shirley Chisholm Dared: The Story of the First Black Woman in Congress, have been greeted with starred reviews, with the latter winning the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. Williams’ latest work, The Talk, earned both a Coretta Scott King Honor and Golden Kite Honor Awards.
Did we say drama? Why yes, Williams graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. She’s performed in commercials, off-off Broadway, a stint of sketch and stand-up comedy, and the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte. She also wrote a play, I Sing My Sister’s Song, which was read at the prestigious Columbia University.
Williams is a highly acclaimed storyteller of folktales and a writer and star of one-woman shows such as A Time to Remember, where she reenacts historical figures and events. She was also commissioned by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library to present The Mourner’s Bench: The Story of Margaret Garner. These roles prepared Williams to record the audiobook for Genesis Begins Again, which was an Audie Awards Finalist.
As a keynote speaker, Williams loves to speak on themes such as the power of storytelling, finding your purpose, on becoming a writer, and mining your life for stories. Her love for education stems from conducting school residencies as a Master Teaching Artist of arts-integration. She infuses her passion for drama, movement, and storytelling to inspire students to write.
And like other great storytellers, she made the leap into writing–and well, her story continues. Williams loves laughing, traveling, and Wonder Woman. Alicia D. Williams has been featured in media outlets such as NPR, QC Nerve, The Charlotte Observer, and Smithsonian Folklife Magazine.
Khalia Moreau
Khalia Moreau is a Brooklyn-based doctor and aspiring forensic pathologist who loves writing twists and turns. When she’s not in the hospital or doing something book-related, you can find her watching anime or K-dramas while snuggling up with her cats. Her debut novel The Princess of Thornwood Drive was named an Amazon Top 20 Pick Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2023.
Ashlee Haze
Ashlee Haze is a poet and spoken word artist from Atlanta by way of Chicago. Earning the nickname “Big 30" because of her consistency in getting a perfect score, she is one of the most accomplished poets in the sport of poetry slam. Ashlee has appeared on NPR's Tiny Desk series alongside composer Blood Orange and has taken poetry to unexpected places including New York Fashion Week, professional sports marketing, and beyond. Ashlee is the host of Moderne Renaissance, an educational and cultural podcast for moderne thinkers. Her studio album “The Anatomy of a Breakup” is available now.
Tyree Daye
Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and River Hymns (American Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Kate Tufts Award finalist, and a 2021 Paterson Prize finalist. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an Amy Clampitt Residency. Daye is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In January 2023, Daye served as Guest Editor of the Poem-a-Day series.
Roscoe Burnems
Two names. Many talents. One amazing experience! Richmond Virginia native, Douglas Powell, artistically known as, Roscoe Burnems is a spoken-word artist, poetry slam champion, comedian, published author, educator, father, and Richmond, VA's inaugural poet laureate. He has dedicated his craft to entertaining and educating. Roscoe uses his platform to be transparent and transformative. Using vulnerability as a superpower, he weaves through storytelling and metaphor seamlessy guiding audiences through a range of emotions, but always ending with empowerment, love, and resilience. Douglas' mission as an artist has been to normalize conversations around mental health and its taboo nature in communities of color and men, while also discussing the effects of race, relationships, education, and access in trauma and depression, using his own journey as an example. His work, a mix of humor and thought-provoking poetry, is often described as refreshing and disarming. You can them find him covering these topics and more on Amazon Prime and other platforms in his film "Traumedy", the first ever poetry and comedy special.