The Gathering: A Cultural Symposium

Torch Literary Arts joins allgo for this celebration of community and culture featuring Marvin K. White and Samiya Bashir. 

Doors Open at 6:30 p.m.

Pay what you can. Suggested $25 donation.

Click Here to RSVP on Eventbrite

Books by the authors will be available for purchase from Bookwoman.

Afterparty to follow at Esquina Tango.

Refreshments will be provided by Mashae's Catering.

Samiya Bashir, called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” by Diego Báez, writing for Booklist, is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, and two Michigan’s Hopwood Poetry Awards among numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies. In addition to her books, Bashir has served as editor to national magazines and anthologies of literature and artwork. In 2002 she was co-founder of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent with whom she worked through 2015.

Marvin K. White is the Minister of Celebration at Glide Memorial Church. Marvin is a writer, artist, preacher and public theologian, articulating a vision for social, prophetic and creative justice. He earned a Master of Divinity from Pacific School of Religion, in Berkeley, CA, and is a well sought-out preacher, teacher and facilitator. Marvin has contributed to local and national publications, and is the author of four collections of poetry: Our Name Be Witness; Status and the two Lambda Literary Award-nominated collections, last rights and nothin’ ugly fly. His poetry has been adapted for stage and screen, and he has performed original works at many theaters. Marvin also performed nationally and internationally as a former member of the acclaimed theater troupe, PomoAfroHomos. He was a Teaching Artist for WritersCorps, and has continued to lead creative arts and writing workshops for a range of audiences. He holds a fellowship in the national African-American poetry organization, Cave Canem, and founded and sat on the board of two BIPOC and LGBTQ writer’s organizations: Fire & Ink and B/GLAM. In 2019, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts named him as one of the “YBCA 100."

Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by emerging and experienced writers alike. Torch has featured work by Colleen J. McElroy, Tayari Jones, Sharon Bridgforth, Crystal Wilkinson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, and others. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, retreats, and special events.

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allgo nurtures and celebrates queer people of color by building, educating, and mobilizing communities toward a just and equitable society. We do this through cultural arts, wellness, and social justice programming by: supporting artists and artistic expression within our diverse communities; promoting health within a wellness model; and mobilizing and building coalitions among groups marginalized by race/ethnicity, gender/gender identity, sexual orientation/sexual identity to enact change.

This program is made possible in part with support from the Austin Cultural Arts Division, the Poetry Foundation, and our host partner, the George Washington Carver Museum.