Torch x Texas Book Festival

Torch Literary Arts is proud to present Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Promise, and Vievee Francis, author of The Shared World, in partnership with the Texas Book Festival. 

Reading and reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 10th. 

Texas Book Festival panel will be held on Saturday, Nov. 11th. 

Times and locations TBD. 

This event is free and open to the public. Donations are appreciated.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and novelist. She received the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of numerous fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Kimbilio, Cave Canem Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Writer’s Chronicle, Transition, American Poet, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), The New York Review of Books, BOMB! Magazine, and many others. Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia, The Requited Distance, Mule & Pear,  Lighting the Shadow, Seeing the Body, and her debut novel, Promise. Griffiths is widely known for her literary portraits, fine art photography, and lyric videos. Her extensive video project, P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), an intimate series of micro-interviews, gathers nearly 100 contemporary poets in conversation, and is featured online by the Academy of American Poets. In 2015,  Griffiths was selected by the Poetry Society of America to curate the Poetry Walk, featuring the poetry of Octavio Paz, for the New York Botanical Garden's exhibit, Frida Kahlo: Art Garden Life. In 2011, Griffiths appeared in the first-ever poetry issue of Oprah’s O Magazine. Her photography also appeared recently in Showtime’s The L Word: Generation Q reboot. Recently, she partnered with Poetry Society of America and Blue Bottle Coffee for their Recollections blend campaign in the fall of 2021. In 2020, she was selected as the 2020 Stella Adler Poet-in-Residence. Griffiths is also the image designer for the libretto, Castor & Patience, written by Tracy K. Smith and composer Gregory Spears, which will premiere in July 2022 at the Cincinnati Opera House.

Vievee Francis is the author of The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She is the recipient of the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.  Born in West Texas, she earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.

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 experienced and emerging 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, and retreats.