HARMONY HOLIDAY

Tuesday, April 26, 2022
5:30pm Central
Crowdcast

Rain Taxi is pleased to celebrate the release of the new book Maafa (Fence Books) by Harmony Holiday. Titled after the Swahili word for Catastrophe, Maafa is an epic poem about reparations and the female body. Through her skilled use of language, Holiday undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity, presenting death as a road to life on a unique hero’s journey. At this special virtual event, Holiday will be in conversation with award-winning Minnesota poet Chaun Webster.

Free to attend, registration required. Registration allows you to view a replay of the event if you cannot attend during the live broadcast. Either way, we hope to “see” you there!


Purchase the book!

Select between two options: pick up at our partner bookseller, Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis, or have it shipped to you. Shipping is for US Media Mail only — if you wish to have this book shipped internationally, please contact orders [at] raintaxi [dot] com for pricing.

To order a copy of a previous poetry book by Harmony, A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom CLICK HERE for an amazing selection from Magers & Quinn Booksellers!


About the Authors

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, filmmaker, archivist, and the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, including Negro League Baseball (Fence, 2011), winner of the Motherwell Prize, Go Find Your Father (Ricochet Editions, 2014), which includes letters to her own father, the late singer-songwriter Jimmy Holiday, and A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom (Birds, LLC, 2019). She curates the Afrosonics archive of jazz and diaspora poetics and a related publishing enterprise called Mythscience, and curates an interdisciplinary performance series at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. She has received numerous awards including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, and a research fellowship from Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room. She lives in Los Angeles.


Chaun Webster is a poet and graphic designer living in Minneapolis whose work interrogates blackness and being as a way to interrogate the world. Webster’s debut book, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime, was published by Noemi Press in 2018, and received the 2019 Minnesota Book Award for poetry.