Interstitial Archaeology: An Evening with Felicia Zamora, Yalie Saweda Kamara & Chandra Frank

Water permeates this stunning collection—ocean, lake, saliva, tears, sweat, blood—and the deeper Felicia Zamora excavates the purer it becomes. Revisiting her childhood as a Latina living in poverty in the United States, Zamora explores racial trauma, estrangement from inherited culture and language, and the instinct to retreat into the body as a space of understanding. Grounded in the specificity of her history, her body, and her life, these poems find the universal threads that connect hummingbirds to whales, Galapagos tortoises to Matt Groening cartoons, family photographs to joy and heartache.

Zamora scavenges her past and America’s present for the hidden meanings at the borders of the social and environmental, linguistic and physical, familial and personal. Along the way she enters into conversations with other poets, activists, and scholars, seeking wisdom, tracing wounds, and amplifying the voices of the marginalized, ultimately creating a space to constellate radical imagination.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.

Copies of Interstitial Archaeology will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Joseph-Beth Cincinnati.

Felicia Zamora is the author of eight books of poetry including, Murmuration Archives, Akrílica Series, Noemi Press (2026), Interstitial Archaeology, Wisconsin Poetry Series (2025), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (2021) and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (2017). She’s won the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, C.P. Cavafy Prize, Wabash Prize, Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards (2024 & 2022). She has been supported by a Tin House Next Book Residency, Ragdale Fellowship, and CantoMundo Fellowship. Her writing appears in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Brevity, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, The Missouri Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is a poetry editor for Colorado Review, a contributing editor for West Branch, and an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati where she is a 2025-2026 Taft Research Center Fellow.

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. She is the current Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Kamara is the author of the poetry collection Besaydoo (Milkweed Editions, 2024), winner of the 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize. Kamara earned a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University. For more, please visit: www.yaylala.com

Chandra Frank is an independent curator, and Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the 2024-2027 Taft Professor of the Public Humanities and works on collaborative and multi-modal methodologies related to art, ecology, walking and public histories. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on feminist and queer of movement work, possibilities of dissent, and the ways in which race and the environment work as terrains of power. She is completing her first monograph, Tidal Politics: Feminist Queer Diaspora & Refusal in the Netherlands, and is working on a creative non-fiction project on tides as feminist and queer relation.