Lit Fridays with Diamond Forde & Yolanda J. Franklin

Lit Fridays is a literary-focused, virtual salon presented by the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, featuring conversations and guest performances on the last Friday* of each month at 6:00p EST via Facebook Live and Zoom Webinar. All conversations are moderated by AWAACC Literary Curator, Jessica Lanay.

Diamond Forde

Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Claremont Graduate University. A Callaloo and Tin House fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Honey Literary, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. She serves as the contributing editor of Southeast Review, the fiction editor of Nat. Brut, and she lives in Asheville with her partner and their dog, Oatmeal.

Yolanda J. Franklin

Blood Vinyls (Anhinga Press) is Yolanda J. Franklin’s debut poetry collection that Roxane Gay insists is a “must-must-must read.” A four-time Fulbright Scholar Award Finalist (’21,’20, ’19, ‘18 & ‘17), Franklin is also a Cave Canem, Callaloo and VONA Fellow. Her poems appear or are set to appear in Frontier Magazine, Sugar House Review, Southern Humanities Review, and The Langston Hughes Review. Franklin’s poetry also appears in the recent anthology It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip Hop. Also, she is a two-time recipient of the J.M. Shaw Academy of American Poets Award. Franklin is a proud third generation Floridian, born in the state’s capital—Tallahassee. She is the 2021-22 Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University in the English, Creative Writing, and African American Studies departments. She collects original press vinyl and can be found at her favorite coffee shop, Square Mug Café in Railroad Square enjoying a custom beverage the baristas named after her.