In-Person: FREEDOM HOUSE by KB Brookins

Please join us for an in-person event to celebrate the poetry collection Freedom House by KB Brookins! For this event, Brookins will read with I.S. Jones, Arianne Elena Payne and S. Yarberry.

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

BUY THE BOOK HERE!

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins’ formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different “rooms”. The speaker isn’t afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more — all while using humor and craft.

What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions, and manifests a world where Black, queer, and trans people get to live.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer and cultural worker from Texas. Their chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) won the Saguaro Poetry Prize. KB’s poems and essays are published in Poets.org, Huffington Post, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. They have earned fellowships from PEN America, Civil Rights Corps, and Lambda Literary among others. KB's debut memoir PRETTY (Alfred A. Knopf) will arrive in 2024, and they are a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts fellow. Follow KB online at @earthtokb.

I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and essayist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus and elsewhere. For the last three years, she served the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory. She is currently an instructor with Brooklyn Poets and is the 2023 Bread Loaf- Rona Jaffe Scholar. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound

Arianne Elena Payne is a Black womanist writer, multidisciplinary creative, and aspiring historian from Chicago, IL. She is currently working on a book (or two) and the poems you see fall somewhere in those projects. Right now, she is exploring the state of mourning, beauty as methodology, ancestral veneration/connection, bitch-hood, and love. You can find her on IG and Twitter @imsomepresha.

S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming in, AGNI, Guernica, Tin House, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Boiler, among others. They are the founder and editor of the little magazine Tyger Quarterly. Smith has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern University where they study William Blake. Their first book of poems, A BOY IN THE CITY, is out now from Deep Vellum.

Accessibility: This event will be at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space on the ground floor. We have an ADA bathroom, adjustable lighting, and reserved parking in the lot behind the store. Face masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. For ASL Interpretation, reserved seating, or other access requests, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.

Image description: A light-blue rectangular banner featuring headshots of all the authors and the book cover for Freedom House. Text reads: In-Person, Women & Children First presents KB Brookins in conversation with I.S. Jones, Arianne Elena Payne and S. Yarberry. Friday, November 10, 7 PM CT. Masks & vaccination required.