Wintergreen Women Writers: A Reading at AWP
Time & Location
Thursday, March 5, 2026
5:30-7 PM EST
Maryland Center for History and Culture, France Hall
610 Park Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21201
Wintergreen Women Writers Collective presents its inaugural reading at AWP 2026, an offsite event of the official Conference & Bookfair, co-sponsored by the Maryland Center for History and Culture. This in-person event is free and open to all.
Join us for the inaugural Wintergreen Women Writers Reading at the 2026 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Baltimore, MD. Authors will include Lauren K. Alleyne, Remica Bingham-Risher, Mahogany L. Browne, Carla DuPree, Latorial Faison, DaMaris Hill, Amanda Johnston and Patricia Smith. Light refreshments will be served.
Please RSVP below.
Lauren K. Alleyne is author of two collections Honeyfish and Difficult Fruit, two chapbooks Dawn in the Kaatskills and (Un)Becoming Gretel, and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Her award-winning work has been widely published in journals and anthologies internationally, including venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, andMs.. Alleyne, who hails from the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, has been recognized with two US Artist Award nominations (2023), an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry (2020), the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press (2017) among other honors. She serves as Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and a Professor of English at James Madison University.
Remica Bingham-Risher is a Cave Canem fellow and faculty member, an Affrilachian Poet, and a member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. She is the author of Conversion, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, What We Ask of Flesh, and Starlight & Error, winner of the Diode Editions Book Award. Her memoir, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up, was published by Beacon Press. Her newest book, Room Swept Home, was a finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award, was chosen as an Honor Poetry Book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA), and won the L.A. Times Book Prize.
Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, playwright, organizer, and educator is a Kennedy Center Next 50 Fellow, and the inaugural Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University, she is also a MacDowell Arts Advocacy Awardee, NAACP Image Award nominess and a New York Emmy nominee for How to Build a City (All Arts). Browne has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Arts for Justice, Baldwin for the Arts, Hawthorden, Mellon Research, Rauschenberg, UCross, and more. Her acclaimed books include Vinyl Moon; Chlorine Sky (optioned by Steppenwolf Theatre); Black Girl Magic; and the frequently challenged works Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice and Woke Baby. Her most recent young adult novel, A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Browne holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Marymount Manhattan College and serves as the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Lincoln Center.
Carla Du Pree is an author, a state/national arts advocate, a consultant, and executive director of the fierce nonprofit, CityLit Project, featuring an award-winning CityLit Festival, CityLit Stage, CityLit Studio, and (poetry series) A Home for the Heart to Live In. She created the Gladiators mentorship program and co-founded Scribente Maternum, presenting the transformative Write Like A Mother Retreat, serving mother writers across the country. With stories/excerpts published in literary journals and anthologies, she’s the recipient of fellowships based on this work from Peter Bullough Foundation, Hedgebrook, Baldwin for the Arts, Rhode Island Writers Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and the Maryland State Arts Council. She was awarded the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies’ DEI Individual Award, named the Maryland State Department of Education’s Arts Leader, and a Cultural Innovator by Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, serving on state/national boards to amplify the literary arts, and magnify DEI.
Latorial Faison is a Virginia poet, author, professor, veteran military spouse, and mother. She is the author of historical research, The Missed Education of the Negro: An Examination of the Black Segregated Education Experience in Southampton County, and over a dozen poetry collections, including Permafrost Poetry Prize winner, Nursery Rhymes in Black (Univ Press of Colorado), Blood at the Root (Finishing Line Press), Mother to Son, the 28 Days of Poetry Celebrating Black History trilogy, and other collections. Faison’s work has been featured in Callaloo, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Artemis Journal, RHINO, Southern Women’s Review, About Place Journal, West Trestle Review, and Stonecoast. Faison is a Pushcart nominee, recipient of the Tom Howard Poetry Prize and fellowships from Furious Flower Poetry Center, AWP, and VA Humanities. An alum of UVA, VA TECH, and VSU, Faison is Assistant Prof. of English & Dept. Chair of Languages & Literature at Virginia State University.
DaMaris B. Hill is a poet and creative scholar. Her books include Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland, and \Vi-zə-bəl\ \Teks-chərs\ (Visible Textures). Her digital work, “Shut Up In My Bones”, is a twenty-first century poem. Her next book, a memoir entitled Blood Bible: An American History, will be published with Bloomsbury in 2027. A former Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Hill is Chair and Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD.
Amanda Johnston is a writer, visual artist, and the 61st Poet Laureate of Texas. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of Another Way to Say Enter, and editor of the anthology Praisesong for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, The Moth Radio Hour, Bill Moyers, The Rumpus, and the anthologies Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, American Short Fiction, and the Academy of American Poets. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation and founder of Torch Literary Arts.
Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner), winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry; Unshuttered (Northwestern 2023), Incendiary Art (Northwestern 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the NAACP Image Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. Smith is a 2024 inductee into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a chancellor in the Academy of American Poets, a Guggenheim fellow, an National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neudstadt Prize, a former fellow at Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo and MacDowell, and a four-time champion of the National Poetry Slam. She is a professor at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor for the City University of New York. Currently, she is at work on her first novel.
About Wintergreen Writers Collective
The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective is a 501(c)3 organization that gathers Black women writers in a literary community that seeks to publish, document, preserve, and celebrate their creative work. More than 70 women from all over the country have taken part in one or more of the Wintergreen retreats or programs over the last 38 years, coming to a place where they can do the sacred work of literary and cultural production. Wintergreen Women are prefiguring a world where the history and legacy of Black women writers are honored and preserved—a world where Black women writers have access to intergenerational spaces where, in community and mutuality, they can nurture one another and locate resources to support their creative practice. Members of the Collective share their knowledge and creativity as a way of encouraging and engaging one another and their extended literary and scholarly communities.
About AWP Conference & Bookfair
The Associated Writing Programs (AWP) is a nonprofit organization that amplifies the voices of writers and the academic programs and organizations that serve them while championing diversity and excellence in creative writing. As a national association of creative writers and writing programs, AWP brings together independent writers, academic writing programs, journals, presses, and arts organizations. AWP hosts the AWP Conference & Bookfair, the largest annual gathering of writers in North America. On March 4-7, 2026, the AWP Conference & Bookfair will be held at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, MD. Learn more about the event and register now.
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