Friday Feature: Lolita Stewart-White
- 13 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Lolita Stewart-White is a poet, playwright, and filmmaker from Liberty City, Florida. She is a Pushcart nominee and winner of the Paris American Series Prize. Her collection, black frag/ments, was selected by poet Ashley M. Jones as the winner of Hub City Press’s BIPOC Poetry Reader Series Prize. Stewart-White’s work has been featured in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, and the African American Review. Her poem “Healing” was featured in the award-winning NAACP anthology This is the Honey, curated by New York Times best-selling author Kwame Alexander. It was also selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the Boston Review’s annual poetry prize. Stewart-White is an alumnus of Miami City Theatre’s Homegrown Program, a playwriting development program that nurtures emerging BIPOC playwrights. She is a Cave Canem Fellows Fund Project Grantee for her play-in-verse, Liberty City Vignettes, currently in development. Stewart-White has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the South Florida Cultural Consortium, the Miami Light Project, and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Her films have been exhibited at the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival, the Seattle Black Film Festival, and the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA).
Good Times (Strange Fruit Episode, 1976)
Norman Lear has sent out a lynching invitation
to the nation – sent it out on the cover of a crumpled
TV Guide. The black father on Good Times must die.
Die because Norman Lear says he must.
The lynching takes place in a CBS studio.
The lynching airs prime time on Tuesday night.
I watch as if I’m at a wake – the linchpin
in my heart loosened. Remember the last scene?
How Florida Evans throws the punch bowl?
Black mother shattered / black father gone / black
family fragments / jagged glass on a project
apartment floor.
Damn
Damn
Damn
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Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.
