Blackbird Poetry Festival
The 2025 Blackbird Poetry Festival
SAVE THE DATE: Thursday, April 24, 2025
The Blackbird Poetry Festival will return with a day of events dedicated to Poetry. Please mark your calendars now for the events below! If you have any questions in the meantime, please contact Tara Hart (thart@howardcc.edu) or Brian Martin (bmartin@howardcc.edu).
Poetry Police 10am-11:30am
Morning Songs Writing Workshop 11:00am-12:15pm - Kittleman Room in Duncan Hall, Room 100
Featuring Tope Folarin
Participants should come prepared to write. For more information, contact Tara Hart (thart@howardcc.edu) or Brian Martin (bmartin@howardcc.edu).
HCC Faculty and Staff Diversity Credit: Blackbird Poetry Festival Morning Songs Workshop
Sunbird Reading 2:00pm-3:30pm - Kittleman Room in Duncan Hall, Room 100
Featuring Denice Frohman and Tope Folarin
Denice Frohman will be joined by students, faculty, staff, and community members for an afternoon of poetry. This event is free and open to the public. After the scheduled readings, there will be an opportunity to share your own poem during our 'open mic' session. For more information, contact Tara Hart (thart@howardcc.edu) or Brian Martin (bmartin@howardcc.edu).
HCC Faculty and Staff Diversity Credit: Blackbird Poetry Festival Sunbird Reading
Nightbird Reading
Nightbird Reading in RCF-400 is a FREE event at 7 pm featuring Denice Frohman. Howard County’s inaugural Poet Laureate and current HCC adjunct faculty member Truth Thomas will do a short reading before Frohman’s reading and Q&A, followed by reception and book signing. Nightbird is presented by our community partner, The Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo). While admission is free to the public, we ask that guests RSVP in advance at blackbird2025.eventbrite.com to ensure entry. For questions, comments, or to request accommodations, please contact us at info@hocopolitso.org or 443-518-4568.
Festival Poet
Denice Frohman
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Denice Frohman is a poet and performer from New York City. She has received support from The Pew Center for the Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poem-A-Day (The Academy of American Poets), The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she has featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Currently, she is developing her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, which centers the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders.
Festival Host
Tope Folarin
Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards.
His reviews, essays and cultural criticism have been featured in The Atlantic, The Baffler, BBC, The Drift, High Country News, Lithub, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Vulture, The Washington Post and elsewhere.
Tope serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. In addition, he will serve as the Bauder Writer-in-Residence in Howard County, Maryland for the 2024-25 school year and as the inaugural critic-at-large for The Georgia Review in 2025
He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters’ degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.