124 E. Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
USA
FRUIT is an independent, community-led reading and dialogue series for and by marginalized voices, hosted in Literati Bookstore. This month’s installment features readings by Tommye Blount, Nandi Comer, and Nathan McClain.
FRUIT is a moment and a movement of reclamation. It is a space of and for literary artists representing the marginalized: the colored, the queer, the silenced, and the unseen. Each event showcases the work of fresh, revolutionary artists and features a conversation around their lives and their crafts. In this space, FRUIT strives to serve as a carefully curated reading and dialogue series for those who live at intersections ignored. This experience exists both physically and digitally in order to help those marginalized voices reclaim their flesh and plant their roots through short-form literature. Our goal is to create an experience that is intentional in its centering of the historically othered. Through this exploration of identity and craft, we hope to cultivate a platform in which the growth and sharing of radical joy— both encumbered and despite— happens in the presence of solidarity and healthy community.
Tommye Blount graduated from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and is a Cave Canem fellow. He is the author of the chapbook, What Are We Not For, and is currently working on his first full-length manuscript, Trapped in the Wrong Body Again.
Nandi Comer is currently pursuing a joint MFA/MFA in Poetry and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Callaloo. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming Callaloo, The New Sound, The Journal for Pan-African Studies and Third Coast.
Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of scholarships from The Frost Place and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Sou’wester, Southern Humanities Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Waxwing, among others.
