Friday, October 26, 7:30 PM
Chapbook Launch: Angel Nafis presents BlackGirl Mansion
Book party with grits, champagne, and more
Hosted by Jon Sands
Music by Shira Erlichman
Featuring readings by Aracelis Girmay, Mahogony L. Browne, Eboni Hogan, T'ai Freedom Ford, Ka'Mone Felix, Lauren Whitehead, and Lynne Procope

Greenlight is thrilled beyond measure to host the New York chapbook launch for our first published employee: poet and MC Angel Nafis! Published as a collaboration between Red Beard Press and New School Poetics, BlackGirl Mansion is a collection of autobiographical and imagined poems that detail the personal and political landscape of BlackGirlhood as seen through the lens of the relationships that exist between the BlackGirl character and the world as she experiences it. Poet and professor Rachel Elizabeth Griffiths writes, “The poems of Angel Nafis undo gravity with their shine and holler. Listen, for hers is an original and astonishing voice.” Join us for a joyous bookstore celebration including readings and performances, balloons, champagne, and Angel’s homemade grits. You can also preorder the book online!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Angel Nafis is an Ann Arbor, Michigan native and Cave Canem Fellow. She is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (RedBeard/New School Poetics 2012) Her work has appeared in FOUND Magazine's Requiem for a Paper Bag, Decibels, The Rattling Wall, Union Station Magazine, GirlSpeak Webzine, The Bear Rivers Writers Review, and MUZZLE Magazine. In 2011 she represented the LouderArts poetry project at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. She is an Urban Word NYC Mentor and the founder, curator, and host of the quarterly Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon reading series. She lives in Brooklyn.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

"Angel Nafis builds a universe on discovery, loss & the secrets, silent terrors, celebrations & sorrows of a BlackGirl in the present, past and future(world)-tense. These poems are “Sturdy and untethered”, they are an invitation to a warm seat, some kool-aid and a smack up-side your head. Free and brazen in form and invention, her ghazals are long-distance runners up-rocking over some horizon. Here are the horrors and the hope to survive and kick-the-ass of the whiteman’s world, to live and love instead anew, in the ALL-together new, vibrant, righteous & necessary BlackGirl Mansion.- Kevin Coval, author of the forthcoming collection Shtick and chapbook, More Shit Chief Keef Don’t Like."

 "These are poems that fill the mouth. They sing sorrow and stitch a family together, then rip it apart again and again. These are poems that fly, that tell the stories of women, their wounds, their love, their bodies, their deep, hungry song...these poems do not beg forgiveness. They do not ask permission or sit cute and quiet in the corner. They bellow. They call. They “clown.” This is signifying at its most original, its most funky. As poet, storyteller, and hymn-stringer, Angel Nafis has written a collection in the tradition of Ntozake Shange and her earth-changing For Colored Girls Who Have ConsideredSuicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf."---from the foreward by Tameka Cage Conley

"Angel Nafis’ poems swallow blood and witness truth at its deepest roots. Nafis writes, “I count myself among the graced” and you do not doubt the wisdom of her spirit and her craft in BlackGirl Mansion. The poems you will find here climb mountains! They share the glory and pains of survival against and within the narrative of family and womanhood. They fight for the love they are and know. The cadence of her heart is to be celebrated! The poems of Angel Nafis undo gravity with their shine and holler. Listen, for hers is an original and astonishing voice: “I am here now,/speaking and giving/in bursts/of chest, and effort,/and temperature.” - Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of "Mule & Pear" and "Miracle Arythmia "