The newest reading series from Bull City Press brings you poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from established and emerging writers for free each month.

This month featuring:

A self-described introvert with a very public profession, Dasan Ahanu is a North Carolina-based cultural organizer, artist, and scholar. As an accomplished cultural leader and poet, Dasan has appeared on NPR News, TV One’s Verses and Flow, and the documentary Poet Son, among other features. He is a resident artist with the St. Joseph’s Historic Foundation/Hayti Heritage Center, co-founder and managing director of Black Poetry Theatre, and the Rothwell Mellon Program Director for Creative Futures with Carolina Performing Arts. He previously served as a founding member and coach of the Bull City Slam Team and has performed and competed extensively across the country alongside the team and independently. He is a visiting professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, teaching courses on hip-hop and Black culture. Among the many great honors throughout his career, Dasan is an alumnus of the Nasir Jones Fellowship with the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. In 2023, he was named the 15th Piedmont Laureate, a one-year program that changes genres annually, for which he serves as a poet. He is the author of four poetry collections, The Innovator (HWJW Publishing, 2010), Freedom Papers (HWJW Publishing, 2012), Everything Worth Fighting For: An exploration of being Black in America (Flowered Concrete, 2016), and Shackled Freedom: Black Living in the Modern American South(Willow Books, 2020). 

Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection Arrow (Alice James Books (U.S.)/Carcanet Press (U.K.), 2020), which has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. She is currently writing a scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, which is under advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.