RhizomeDC and Day Eight have teamed up to present an event with the editors and contributors to Diaspora Cafe: D.C., a new anthology of poetry featuring writing on the AfroLatinx experience. Diaspora Café: D.C. is a collective investigation of survival by writers within a system that deprioritizes their existence.
The editors Jeffrey Banks and Maritza Rivera will read alongside four contributors: Christine Williams, Sistah Joy, Stephani E. D. McDow, and Nick Leininger.
A review by Angela Maria Spring in the Washington Review of Books says [the collection] “includes a wonderful arrangement of poems by our community’s poets from the African diaspora and touches on topics from celebrating Caribbean beats on DC streets to the struggle of anti-Blackness and racism from both white people and also from within African-American and Afro-Latinx communities.”
In a review by in Washington City Paper, Emma Veon writes, “Diaspora Café: D.C. celebrates and preserves difference, recognizing the breadth of Afro Latinx people who “embody many shades of a ‘Brown.’” Banks and Rivera assembled 34 poems from 14 writers in this intimate anthology representing the region’s dynamic Afro Latinx culture… The poems are by and about Afro Latinx creatives, and the collection, so intimate and honest, generously welcomes unfamiliar readers to a fictive cafe bustling with life.”
