Welcome Table Talk #5: Parables and Provisions: Feeding the Soil and the Soul
Time & Location
July 11, 2026, 12:00 PM EST
Webinar
Wintergreen Women Writers Collective (Wintergreen) and Torch Literary Arts (Torch) are embarking on an intergenerational three-year project for Black women writers called Welcome Table Talks. The virtual discussions will cover various topics related to organization building, literary freedom, legacy, and more. The virtual discussions are free and open to all.
Torch Literary Arts and the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective present the latest installment of Welcome Table Talk - Parables and Provisions: Feeding the Soil and the Soul with Shauna M. Morgan and Malika Booker, moderated by Carmin Wong.
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Dr. Shauna M. Morgan is a poet-scholar and associate professor of creative writing and Africana literature at the University of Kentucky. Her critical work has been published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Atlantic Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in A Gathering Together, Interviewing the Caribbean, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, among other periodicals and anthologies. Her debut collection, Ground Provisions, was shortlisted for the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry. An urban gardener, Shauna tends a hopeful provision ground at her home in the East End Artists’ Village in Lexington, and she continues to explore the environmental and cultural linkages between her rural Jamaican upbringing and her US-Kentucky life.
Malika Booker is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). The Anthology - Two Young, Two Black, Too Different, Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen was recently published to celebrate Malika Poetry Kitchen’s twenty-year anniversary. Her pamphlet Breadfruit, (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection.
She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). Booker and Shara McCallum recently co-edited the issue of Stand Journal curating an anthology of poems by African American, Black British, & Caribbean Women & Identifying Writers. Booker currently hosts and curates Peepal Tree Press’s Literary podcast, New Caribbean Voices.
A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). Her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75(autumn 2019) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2020). Her poem Libation, published in Poetry Review (winter 2022) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2023).
Carmin Wong (she/her/We) is a Guyanese-born poet·organizer, playwright, and dual-title ph.d candidate in english Lit·orature and African American and Diaspora Studies at pennsylvania state university. She is the 2025 inaugural Poet Laureate of State College, Pennsylvania. Rooted in Black feminist praxis and a Caribbean diasporic sensibility, her work explores the intersections of oral and written poetries, with particular attention to Black liberation movements across the long twentieth century.
Her work has been supported by the Africana Research Center (ARC) and the Center for Black Digital Research at Pennsylvania State University, where she served as a 2025 #FrancesEWHarper200 Poetry Project Coordinator. Her poetry has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets and featured in a number of journals and on public radio.
Carmin is co-author of the choreopoems A Chorus Within Her and What Does Purple Sound Like?, and playwright of Finding Home: Adeline Lawson Graham, centering 19th-century free Black Pennsylvanians. A recipient of multiple artist grants and fellowships, she teaches poetry to justice-impacted students across jails, prisons, and juvenile detention centers, as well as in K–12 schools, college classrooms, and community programs.
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 Torch Literary Arts
Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established with love and intention in 2006 to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Torch Magazine has featured work by Toi Derricotte, Tayari Jones, Sharon Bridgforth, Crystal Wilkinson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and others. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.
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