Collard greens, okra, fried chicken, company chicken, pileau (pronounced perlo), sweet tea, pound cake and more appear throughout my poetry. Each dish is important to my experiences with my family and my community. Think of the dishes that are staples for you. What are the memories you have with that food? How do you feel while eating it? Who are you with? The tastes, textures, and smells are the menu for memory, emotion, and therefore poetry. In this workshop, we will explore the connections between food, memory, and poetry. Come with 1-2 dishes and memories associated with them in mind. If you have a family recipe you’d like to explore, bring that too.
Saturday, March 23, 2:00-4:00 p.m. at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. Limited to 15 participants. (A minimum of five participants is needed for this workshop.) $40/person. Register in advance at
https://foodwaysinpoetry.eventbrite.com
About our instructor:
Poet Laureate of Columbia, South Carolina, and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, Jennifer Bartell Boykin is the author of Traveling Mercy (from Finishing Line Press). Her poetry has appeared in Obsidian, Callaloo, the Raleigh Review, kinfolks: a journal of black expression, the museum of americana: a literary review, and Scalawag. Bartell Boykin is the recipient of fellowships from Callaloo and The Watering Hole. She teaches creative writing and English dual-enrollment courses at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, where she was named the 2019–20 Teacher of the Year. She is also an American Library Association Spectrum Scholar and an Augusta Baker Scholar at the University of South Carolina’s School of Information Science, where she is pursuing her master of library and information science degree. Bartell Boykin was born and raised in Bluefield, a Black community in Johnsonville, South Carolina.
In addition to teaching her workshop, Bartell Boykin will aslo be reading from and discussing her new collection of poems at the Conroy Center from 5:00-6:30 p.m. that same evening. Books will be available for sale and signing.
