Featuring live performances by Alyson Palmer, Dael Orlandersmith, Erica Ford, Gabby Beans, Italy Lee, Kimberly Drew, Martha Redbone, Raquel Willis, Regina Fleming, Sol Street, Sydni Johnson, and Tressie McMillan Cottom. Narrated by Rebecca Carroll and Haley Pessin.

The event features musical and spoken word performances from Black women and nonbinary artists, inspired by the Black women writers featured in the acclaimed book I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, edited by Rebecca Carroll, now available in a revised, expanded edition from Haymarket Books.

Thirty years after its original publication, this newly imagined edition brings the work and musings of fifteen Black literary luminaries in conversation with a new generation of writers and readers.

The first edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, published in 1994, remains an essential text for readers of Black feminist literature in all genres. Featuring interviews with and excerpts by writers like Rita Dove, Pearl Cleage, Nikki Giovanni, J California Cooper, June Jordan, and others, this indispensable work speaks to the intersections of politics and art-making along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Now, writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll presents the original conversations alongside personalized introductions by some of the brightest voices in today’s literary world, including J Wortham, Safiya Sinclair, Keah Brown, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, among others. This new edition also includes an introductory poem by Morgan Parker and a foreword by Salamishah Tillet. 

I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like is a book unbound by time, lifting up a chorus of past and present voices. Paying homage to a historic lineage of Black feminist writers and their impact on our current literary landscape, it is a book by and for the storytellers, the poets, the playwrights, the dreamers, and all readers interested in what it means to make art within and from marginalized spaces.

This event is free and open to the public. Admission and seating are on a first-come, first-served basis.