Sisters in Struggle and Song: A Reading and Conversation with Mariposa Fernández, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs & Patricia Spears Jones

Celebrate the publication of the Library of America’s history-making anthology, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young, with New York-based poets Mariposa Fernandez (Bronx), LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs (Harlem), and Patricia Spears Jones (Brooklyn).

Mariposa María Teresa Fernández is an award-winning Afro Puerto Rican poet, spoken word performance artist, visual artist, educator, activist, and scholar from the Bronx. Fernández’s poetry has been published in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, The Afro [email protected] Reader: History & Culture in the United States, and Manteca: Anthology of [email protected] Poets, among others, and she is a recipient of the 2020 CUNY Adjunct Incubator grant. She is a CUNY faculty member and teaches at Herbert H. Lehman College in the Women and Gender Studies Program and the Africana Studies Department, as well as the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York.

A writer, vocalist and performance/sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK. Diggs’s awards included a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others. She lives in Harlem.

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, educator, cultural activist, anthologist, and recipient of 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize. Spears Jones is the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems, three full-length collections, and five chapbooks, and she co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women. She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence, and she is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress.

Presented by One Book One Bronx; the Leonard Lief Library, the Africana Studies Department, the Women's Studies Program, and the School of Arts and Humanities at Lehman College, CUNY; CUNY Center for Humanities; Lift Every Voice

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