PEN Presents: Danez Smith + Fatimah Asghar

Join us for Be Ours: Palentine’s Day with Danez and the Homies, a night of poetry and performance celebrating the saving grace of friendship. Poet Danez Smith marks the publication of their new collection, Homie, with an unprecedented gathering of Angeleno writers and artists. Stay for a DJ set and libations at a Pal-entine’s after-party. Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Eso Won Books.

Presented in partnership with California African American Museum.

Danez Smith is the author of Homie; Don’t Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award; and [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They live in Minneapolis.

Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, screenwriter, educator and performer. Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets and many others. Her work has been featured on new outlets like PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011 she created a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina called REFLEKS while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective, a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship recipient, and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After came out on Yes Yes Books fall 2015. She is the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. Her debut book of poems, If They Come For Us, was released through One World/ Random House, August 2018.

This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.