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Writer's pictureAshley Dillon

Uplifting Black Women's Voices (July 11)

Updated: Jul 13



Join us for a brilliant reading and thoughtful conversation Thursday, July 11 at 7:00pmET. This reading will be livestreamed via YouTube. To join, visit Lit Youngstown's YouTube Channel, and click on the "Live" tab. Thank you to Elizabeth's Bookshop for creating a bookshelf for this reading:


Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the UK and grew up in Nigeria. Her stories have been honored with a National Magazine Award, a Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Caine Prize and an O. Henry Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, GRANTA and has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, United States Artists and MacDowell. She was selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and her debut collection WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2018 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club. She lives in Minneapolis.


Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, winner of the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize (Mad Creek Books, 2021) and Haint (Gival Press, 2016) winner of the Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Her work has been honored with a Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award, the Poetry Society of America's (PSA) Robert H. Winner Memorial Award, and Sustainable Arts grant and a Meret grant from the Freya Project. A Cave Canem fellow, she has been awarded scholarships, residencies and fellowships to attend the Community of Writers Workshop, Hedgebrook, the Soul Mountain Writer’s Retreat, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is on the Advisory Council of Split This Rock and a member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective. She has been a semi-finalist and finalist judge for the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Out Loud. She is the Poetry Coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.


Mary McLaughlin Slechta is winner of the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize for Mulberry Street: Stories. She is also the author of a choose-your-own-adventure-style book, The Spoonmaker’s Diamond, and a poetry collection, Wreckage on a Watery Moon. She has published several chapbooks, and her work appears in journals and anthologies, including Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora and Best Small Fictions 2021. She is recipient of the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize from The Caribbean Writer and has twice served as poet-in-residence at Chautauqua. She grew up in a small African American and Jamaican community in rural Connecticut, and earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut and her master’s degree from Syracuse University. She lives in Syracuse with her family.


Kortney Morrow is a poet creating from her studio in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has received support from 68to05, The Academy of American Poets, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Transition Magazine. She has her MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University. In 2023, she was awarded the Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant Award from the Ohioana Library Association for her essay The Care & Keeping of You. When she’s not writing, she’s co-running Studio Reciprocity—a consulting collective that helps organizations and individuals heal, re-imagine, and transform.

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