Lampblack Reading Series May’25

Soraya Palmer is the author of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, which recently won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction and has been shortlisted for the Pen/Open Book Award. It has been named a best or most anticipated novel by Today, Elle, Ms. Magazine, and Goodreads among others. She has been awarded grants, residences, and fellowships for her writing from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, Blue Mountain Residency, and the Nawat Fes Residency in Fes, Morocco. She was born and raised in Flatbush and is a licensed clinical social worker who has organized and advocated for criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, tenants facing eviction, and victims of police brutality. She currently teaches Graduate Fiction at CUNY City College and Writing Magical Realism for the Center for Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Nicholas.

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. Her fourth collection, I Hope this Helps, is forthcoming in May 2025 from Nightboat Books.

Rich Benjamin is the author of Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History (Pantheon Books, 2025), a family memoir that doubles as a portrait of America. Benjamin’s first book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America (2009), was selected for an Editor’s Choice award from the American Library Association. Now in its second printing, this groundbreaking study is one of the first to have illuminated in advance the rise of Trumpism, white anxiety, and white nationalism in current US life. Benjamin’s writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and he’s interviewed often in the international and US media, including NPR, MSNBC, and PBS. His work has received support from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, Civitella, Bellagio, Princeton University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.