Keli Stewart, a lighter-skinned Black woman with brown braids and wearing a purple dress, is outside with greenery in the background. — Keli Stewart

Ciara Miller, an African American woman, sits in her sister's beauty salon chair — Keli Stewart

Readings & Lectures

Open Door/Front Porch: Keli Stewart, George Bailey, Ciara Miller, Kira Tucker, and Scheherazade Tillet

September 14, 2024 | 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Poetry Foundation, 61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654

The Open Door series spotlights creative relationships and collaborations rooted in the Midwest, inviting two featured writers and their guests to share work that opens up poetry as an expansive art form. For the first Open Door event of the fall season, we partner with Front Porch Arts Center, a community arts organization on Chicago’s West Side, for Open Door/Front Porch featuring Front Porch founder and artistic director Keli Stewart accompanied by George Bailey and Ciara Miller. Also featured will be Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow finalist Kira Tucker in collaboration with Scheherezade Tillet, co-founder and director of A Long Walk Home.

farther down my tree-lined street, hemingway was born
farther down the other way, a black boy, being

mourned

— Keli Stewart, from Small Altars

Outside, cloudlets of war gas steep the streets in our weeping. At once, I grieve and crave arrested breath—to embody a blank among other

nothings.

— Kira Tucker, from Self-Assessment: June 2020

Amidst the United States election season, the Poetry Foundation’s fall programs amplify a chorus of counternarratives and undertones of the hemispheric Americas. Our season title “murmuring americas” riffs on the title of a new book by Chicago poet Daniel Borzutzky, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas.

The Poetry Foundation’s events are completely free of charge and open to the public. Advanced registration is encouraged. This event will include CART captioning and ASL interpretation. For more information about accessibility at the Poetry Foundation, please visit our Accessibility Guide.