Join us for an evening with MaKshya Tolbert, who will read from her debut poetry collection, Shade is a place. A conversation with Lisa Russ Spaar will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Shade is a place meanders east-west along Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, seeking “a Black sense of place” at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall’s architectural history, and the speaker’s ongoing questions and reflections. The collection of poems is a moving invitation to open one’s attention by looking up, down, and always within. Through lyric walking poems (“tree walks” and “shade walks”) and Basho-style travelogue, Shade is a place unfolds as much through arboreal life as through one’s inner life—sometimes alone, sometimes with others, and always among turning trees.
About the Author: MaKshya Tolbert practices poetry and placemaking in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. Her recent poetry and prose can be found at Poem-a-Day, Poets for Science, Emergence Magazine, West Branch, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, and elsewhere. She has received recent fellowships from Cave Canem, New City Arts, Art-in-Library Spaces at the University of Virginia, and Community of Writers. Currently, MaKshya co-stewards Fernland Studios, an open-ended studio insistent on rest, rejuvenation, and reciprocity. Shade is a place is MaKshya’s first book. In her free time, she is elsewhere.
About the Moderator: Lisa Russ Spaar has published thirteen books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and a novel, Paradise Close. A new volume of Spaar’s poetry, Soul Cake, will appear from Persea in May 2026. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Horace W. Goldsmith NEH Distinguished Professorship appointment. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, VQR, and elsewhere. She is professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia, where she founded the Area Program in Poetry Writing and served as its director for twenty years.
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