AVAILABLE FROM BEACON PRESS, BOOKSHOP.org & wherever books are sold.

“Migration Letters… is a gift and a machete.” - Destiny Crockett

“Drawn from her experiences of being born in Philadelphia, into a Black family and a Black culture transported from the American South by the Great Migration, M. Nzadi Keita’s poetry sparks a profoundly hybrid gaze of the visual and the sensory.”

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PRINT NEWS:

My personal essay, “My Kind,” appears in When We Exhale: An Anthology of Black Women Rooted in Ancestral Medicine. Available at blackfreighterpress.com and bookshop.org

“Ask the Lonely,” a poem in tribute to The Four Tops, appears in Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Motown Poetry Revue. Available at madvillepublishing.com and bookshop.org

UPCOMING EVENTS:

•  Black Cultural Heritage Fair & Celebration

  Parkway Central Free Library, 1901 Vine St., Phila. PA

  Feb 21, 1:00 - 4:00pm

• Free Library Independence Branch

  18 S. 7^th Street, Phila, PA

  Feb. 24, 5:00pm

• MIGRATION LETTERS on display in NYC until Feb. 28

  MIGRATION LETTERS is on display in NYC until Feb. 28 at the Poets' House Showcase, a free exhibition of poetry books published from 2024-25. Info: poetshouse.org/programs

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“One current poet, M. Nzadi Keita, has tried through literary imagination to give Anna a voice… Such poetry is not a historical source for Anna’s interior world. But it does provide us a language by which we can gaze into it.” David W. Blight author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“How your bangs comb out sparks each day’s

happiness. Double-dutching

in plaid jumpers and knee socks.

Running through sprinklers, those

birdlike fingers foretell fringe.”

from Migration Letters:

“[Set for Chaka Khan: Yvette]”

Healing Verse Germantown Public Art Poetry Project: Coming Soon!

In Spring, ’26, a poem for my late brother, titled “Ben,” will be shared through an innovative public art project by Healing Verse Germantown. A temporary poetry and public art project supported by the City of Philadelphia through Creative Philadelphia, and a winner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge grant, this project will engage Germantown residents in healing verses of poetry and will be a powerful outlet for collective expression, cultivating peace and resistance against violence in Germantown and throughout Philadelphia. More info: healingversegermantown.com

Their faces conveyed the remote calm of people who were wide awake, caffeinated, and trained on an agenda.  Following their cues, I stuffed my expectation that we would ramp up with a few minutes of chat. … One of the consultants, the grant specialist, slouched on a divan with his eyes half-obscured by a black hoodie. He launched with a blunt-edged question that belied his utterly casual presentation: “What’s the central idea behind your LOA?”