New York Chapbook Launch: Layla Benitez-James’ “God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure”
Wed, Apr 11, 2018
7:00 PM–8:30 PM
Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop (141 Front Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn)
Celebrate the launch of Layla Benitez-James’s God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure, winner of the third annual Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, with a reading by the prize judge, Major Jackson, and the winner, as well as a moderated conversation between the two by Myckaela Wharton of Raven Press.
In anticipation of the reading, read this interview “Reach for the Right Things” with poet Layla Benitez-James and Lost & Found Managing Editor Stephon Lawrence discussing Benitez-James’ new chapbook “God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure” as well as her thoughts around the compulsion to collect, turning over ideas of desire, and the entangled holiness between a portrait of Jimi Hendrix and the Virgen de Guadalupe.
Cosponsored by Cave Canem, Raven Press, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop.