Canto-Kójo: Reading Series and Bloodmercy Book Launch

In Yorùbá the word “kojo” means “to gather”. In Spanish, “canto” means “to sing”. In our efforts to gather community together, we hope to make something new sing. With that, the inaugural Canto-Kójo Reading Series launches on September 11, 2025 at 7 PM. The inaugural session will be accompanied by the launch of Chicago-based poet I.S. Jones' debut collection, Bloodmercy. Reception to follow!

Selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Bloodmercy is a must-read debut that reimagines the tale of Cain and Abel as sisters.

"Violence is a failure of communication" opens this book as an omen and foregrounds a family exiled from Eden. In I.S. Jones's stunning and evocative debut collection, Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose care for each other becomes increasingly fraught--the siblings vicious as they vie for the attention of a negligent father. Parallel to this, their bodies budding within and against the still-forming landscape, the girls navigate the shame of Eve's sin while coming into their own sexuality.

Grounded in the remote natural world, enclosed by firs and redwoods, Bloodmercy follows Cain and Abel through the dense geography of girlhood into young womanhood. Along the way, they discover the limits of power and control, spite and sex, faith and death, and man's dominion over the earth. Found in the space between the Old Testament and the modern world, the girls gaze heavenward and pose enduring questions to God. Lyrical, lush, and bursting with tender imagination, Bloodmercy marks a debut to watch.

I.S. Jones is an American/Nigerian poet, editor, essayist, and former music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Hedgebrook Callaloo, BOAAT Writer's Retreat, Brooklyn Poets, and Bread Loaf, where she was the 2023 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in poetry. Jones co-edited The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is an editor at 20:35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and has freelanced for Complex, Revolt TV, NBC News THINK,and elsewhere.

Yazud Brito-Milan is a Chicane poet, museum educator, and abolitionist organizer. Born in Winston-Salem, NC, and living in Chicago, they are currently working on their first chapbook, crossfade.

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