Welcome Table Talks #2: Stories from our Past: Genealogy as Creative Inspiration
Time & Location
Jul 15, 2025, 6:00 PM CDT
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.
Join us for the next Welcome Table Talk"Stories from our Past: Genealogy as Creative Inspiration" with Remica Bingham-Risher and Dr. Daryl Dance, moderated by Maryemma Graham.
Click here to purchase books by the featured authors on Torch's Bookshop page.
Remica Bingham-Risher, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, is an alumna of Old Dominion University and Bennington College. She is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Among other journals, her work has been published in the New York Times, the Writer’s Chronicle, New Letters, Callaloo and Essence. She is the author of Conversion (Lotus, 2006) winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, What We Ask of Flesh (Etruscan, 2013) shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Award and Starlight & Error (Diode, 2017) winner of the Diode Editions Book Award. Her first book of prose, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions that Grew Me Up, was published by Beacon Press in 2022. Her book of poems along with family and historical photographs, Room Swept Home, was published by Wesleyan in February 2024. She is currently the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University and resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children.
Daryl Cumber Dance is Professor Emerita, University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University. She was a Visiting Professor of Black Studies at UCSB; Jessie Ball DuPont Visiting Professor at UR; and Sterling A. Brown Professor of English at Howard University. She is the author of four literary studies, including Fifty Caribbean Writers; New World Adams; In Search of Annie Drew, the Mother and Muse of Jamaica Kincaid; and Remembering Paule: A Photo Memoir of Her Richmond Years. Her numerous folklore studies such as Honey, Hush!, Shuckin’ and Jivin’, From My People, Long Gone, and Folklore from Contemporary Jamaicans have resulted in her being dubbed “The Dean of American Folklore.” She, along with Daryl Lynn Dance, is the author of their family genealogy: The Lineage of Abraham: The Biography of a Free Black Family in Charles City, VA. She has recently turned her attention to fiction, completing Till Death Us Did Part, Land of the Free . . . Negroes, and Here Am I in 2020. She has held numerous study and research grants, including Two Ford Foundation Fellowships, three Southern Fellowships Fund grants, two N.E.H. grants, one Fulbright research grant, one Robert R. Moton research grant, two Virginia Commonwealth University Grants-in-Aid, two University of Richmond travel grants, one University of Richmond research grant, one Virginia Endowment for the Humanities Resident Fellowship, and one grant from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA. She has received numerous honors and awards and served on more than thirty major committees and boards.
Maryemma Graham is University Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. In 1983, she founded the Project on the History of Black Writing, which has been at the University of Kansas since 1999. With 10 published books, including The Cambridge History of African American Literature with Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (2011), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (2002), Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice (1998), and The Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (1988) and more than 100 essays, book chapters, and creative works, she will publish with support from the Hall Center for the Humanities the translingual volume Toni Morrison: Au delà du visible ordinaire/Beyond the Visible and Ordinary with co-editors Andrée-Anne Kekeh (Université Paris 8) and Janis A. Mayes (Syracuse University) in 2014 and The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker in 2015. Her public humanities initiatives and international projects since her arrival at KU include The Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, 2002-2005, the Language Matters teaching initiative for the Toni Morrison Society 2003-2010, the Haiti Research Initiative 2011, and “Don’t Deny My Voice,” whose first summer institute on African American poetry was held in 2013. Graham has been a John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, a Ford and Mellon Fellow, and has received more than 15 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to African American literature and culture, Graham teaches courses in genre studies (the novel and autobiography), Inter American Studies (transnationalism, the Global South), and is an active proponent of the digital humanities.
You can find out more about Wintergreen by visiting their website at wintergreenwomenwriterscollective.com, and more about their pilot partnership, Torch, at torchliteraryarts.org.
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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