Author Reading & Conversation: Chavonn Williams Shen

Date and Time

• Saturday, Jun 21, 2025  2pm - 4pm

Location

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Details

Please join us for a special afternoon reading and conversation with writer, educator, and activist Chavonn Williams Shen at Griot on Saturday, June 21st at 2pm. Williams Shen will be reading from their debut book, Still Life with Rope and River. We will have copies for sale in our bookstore and available for signing.

This event is free and open to the community.

Nominated for the Maya Angelou Book Award, Still Life with Rope and River explores racism through a chorus of voices surrounding Emmett Till’s murder. Through research in combination with emotional truth, Williams Shen uses persona poems to dive deep into the psyche of both common and lesser known people and objects regarding Till’s lynching. Williams Shen also weaves in their own narrative and family history of how Blackness is dissected and dismissed, illustrating how the past is a ghost to the present.

“In poems that are, by turns, inventive, provocative, and frank, Still Life with Rope and River weaves the past and the present together with the national and the personal as part of an urgent but subtle reminder that if we can’t remember America’s violent history, we’re doomed to repeat it. These poems are difficult and challenging at times but also encouraging. “Let us praise how we’ve thrived under war,” Chavonn Williams Shen concludes. “We’ve made things that tried to kill us into fields of sunflowers…” Ultimately, what emerges is a testament to survivors, to resiliency. Still Life with Rope and River heralds the arrival of an innovative and uncompromising poetic voice.” - Michael Kleber- Diggs