Continuing its year-long celebration of African American poetry, Montgomery County Community College is set to host an online community poetry workshop featuring a special guest artist.

The College will host “Creating Black Diasporic Poetry: A Workshop” online Wednesday, Feb. 3, from 6-7 p.m. Attendees will learn about Black poetic themes, styles and techniques with artist and poet, Sonsiris Tamayo. All poetry created during this session will be showcased in the Libraries & Archives digital display during Poetry Month in April. All levels and writers welcome. The online event is free and open to the community.

This past fall, Dr. Fran Lassiter, English Associate Professor, and Amanda M. Leftwich, Student Success Librarian, won grant funding from the Library of America’s “Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters,” initiative, allowing them to host programming at the College dedicated to enhancing appreciation of the extraordinary range and richness of the 250-year-long African American poetic tradition.

Last October, Lassiter and Leftwich used the grant to host the online panel discussion, “Black History and Memory: A Discussion on Black Diasporic Poetry." Now, the two are leading this event, followed by a poetry reading later in the month.

“We are both very excited to host this poetry workshop,” said Lassiter. “It coincides with Black History Month and the idea of putting on events like this for students, faculty and the community is very important. Poetry is a tool used to unify and for education. This poetry workshop will be based on that opportunity for those able to attend.”

Lassiter and Leftwich said Tamayo was chosen for the workshop for her unique talent and experience. She is a Dominican-American speaker, author, and healer raised in the Bronx, N.Y. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Psychology from the College of New Rochelle in New Rochelle, N.Y. Her spiritual call led her to Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Ca. where she received her Master of Divinity in 2010 and then a Master of Arts in Culture and Spirituality from Holy Names University in 2013. Tamayo enjoys writing poetry; taking part in a variety of cultural and spiritual events; reading; laughing; spending time in nature and dancing as well as sharing a good meal with friends and family.

Lassiter and Leftwich encouraged community members to attend the workshop, saying it was a great opportunity for writers to have their work critiqued by a professional.

MCCC celebrates African American culture and history annually during the Pan African Festival hosted by the Black Student Union. The yearly festival was first created over a quarter of a century ago to recognize the contributions of Malcolm X, as well as those of the African Diaspora, meaning where Africans are from throughout the world.

“Lift Every Voice” is presented by Library of America with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Emerson Collective. Its principal objective is to engage participants in a multifaceted exploration of African American poetry, the perspectives it offers on American history and the struggle for racial justice, and the universality of its imaginative response to the personal experiences of black Americans over three centuries, according to its website.

MCCC was selected as one of 49 libraries in 24 states to receive the Library of America’s “Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters” grant. A total of $58,800 was awarded to public libraries and other institutions in the form of $1,200 stipends to support public programs centered on a core selection of poems that illustrate five humanities themes at the heart of the project. Poets and scholars will participate in all programs, which will be presented online from September 2020 through February 2021 and will be free and open to the public.

The launch of the “Lift Every Voice” celebration coincided with the publication in September of “African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song,” a major new Library of America anthology edited by Kevin Young, who also serves as principal humanities advisor on the project. Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library.

For more information, contact Fran Lassiter at flassite@mc3.edu or Amanda Leftwich at aleftwich@mc3.edu.