Featured Readers

Stephanie Wambugu was born in Mombasa, Kenya and she grew up in New England. She lives and works in New York. Her first novel Lonely Crowds will be published by Little, Brown this July.

Irvin Weathersby is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. His writing has been featured in LitHub, Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and elsewhere. He has earned an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, and a BA from Morehouse College. He has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation. In Open Contempt is his first book and mediates on art, public space, white supremacy, and social justice in order to create a more equitable future.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2025) and I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She also wrote the chapbook Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Additionally, she has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, and other notable publications. She is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Clark is at work on a memoir-in-essays, Begging to Be Saved, which explores Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art-making, and historical methods of Black survival.

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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.

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