Morgan Parker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Magical Negro, a poetry collection that ponders the nuances of Black American womanhood. She is also the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collections Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the winner of a Pushcart Prize, Parker is the creator/co-curator of the Poets With Attitude reading series and is a member of The Other Black Girl Collective. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues, including The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Best American Poetry, a Broadway playbill, and two Common albums. In You Get What You Pay For, she charts the generational and historical difficulties, traumas, and beauty of existing as a Black woman.

Shantrelle P. Lewis is a multi-hyphen creative and scholar who accesses multiple disciplines to help elucidate African Diasporic history, aesthetics, culture and spirituality. After premiering at BlackStar Film Festival, her critically acclaimed directorial debut, In Our Mothers' Gardens, was released on Netflix via Ava Duvernay's Array. Her book, Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, was published by Aperture in 2017. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, LA Times, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, NPR, BBC, Washington Post, Slate, The New Yorker and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She co-founded Shoppe Black with her husband and fellow Howard alum, Tony Oluwatoyin Lawson. As an initiated Lukumi Sango Priest, hoodooist and New Orleans native, Shantrelle can be found waxing poetic about all things African spirituality online and in person at the Beaucoup Hoodoo Shop, the annual Beaucoup Hoodoo Fest this October and within her community, ATRS Book Club.

The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.

(recorded 3/13/2024)