Lampblack Reading Series: Tracey Rose Peyton, Emily Raboteau + Nicole Sealey

Featured Readers

Tracey Rose Peyton is the author of Night Wherever We Go, which was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction Debut Novel Prize and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Her short work has appeared in Guernica, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Short Stories 2021. She is currently a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, public art, and parenthood. Her books are Lessons for Survival, shortlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, Searching for Zion, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Professor’s Daughter. Since the release of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, she has focused on writing longform essays about the climate crisis. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s distinctions include the Climate Narratives Prize, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Yaddo. She serves as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a full professor in the Black Studies Department at the City College of New York (CUNY). She lives with her family in the Bronx.

Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems, for and about One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, an Amy Clampitt Residency, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University. For bookings please contact Anya Backlund at Blue Flower Arts.

————

About Lampblack

The Lampblack Literary Foundation (Lampblack) is a non profit 501(c)(3) organization created by Black writers to support, promote, and celebrate Black writers. They provide monetary relief through direct aid, connect writers and readers of Black literature through virtual and in-person literary events, and publish a magazine dedicated to voices from the Black diaspora. Lampblack is committed to the advancement of Black literature and strives to expand the reach of this work because critical engagement with Black culture is a necessary and radical act.

To support Lampblack’s mission and help keep the Lampblack Reading Series and other vital programs free, please click here.