City of Artists: D. Watkins and Celeste Doaks with Cara Ober
Tuesday, December 12 :: 6pm
@ Bird in Hand
We are thrilled to invite you to Bird in Hand for a celebration of CITY OF ARTISTS, Bmore Art’s first ever full length book! This gorgeous coffee table book highlights the range and depth, contradiction and harmony of Baltimore’s artists. Pairing essays from local writers with reproductions of artists’ work, CITY OF ARTISTS explores the reasons why Baltimore creates a rich, vital context for artistic creation and practice.
Two featured writers from the book, D. Watkins and Celeste Doaks, will speak on a panel with Cara Ober, Editor and Publisher.
Books will be available for sale at the event.
Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields, Wrecking Ball Press, UK, March 2015. She’s the editor (and contributor in) of poetry anthology Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Joy, and Sexuality, Mason Jar Press, May 2017. Cornrows was listed as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2015” by Beltway Quarterly Poetry. Her poem “For the Chef at Helios…” received a 2015 Pushcart Prize nomination. Her multiple accolades include a 2017 Rubys Grant in Literary Arts, a Lucille Clifton Scholarship to attend Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, the 2010 AWP WC&C Scholarship, and residencies at Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her journalism has appeared in the Huffington Post, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and QBR (Quarterly Black Book Review). Her poems have been published in multiple on-line and print publications such as Chicago Quarterly Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Bayou Magazine and Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Her poems have also appeared in multiple anthologies including Misrepresented People: A Poetic Responses to Trump’s America, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, and Home Is Where: An Anthology of African American Poetry from the Carolinas.Celeste received her MFA from North Carolina State University and has held teaching positions at East Carolina University, Morgan State University, and Stevenson University. She was also the 2017-2020 Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University of Delaware.
Her newest work, American Herstory, is the winner of Backbone Press’s 2018 chapbook competition. American Herstory has also been named Best Chapbook by Maryland Poet Laureate, Grace Cavalieri. This chapbook focuses on Michelle Obama; it includes ekphrastic poems about the First Lady’s art choices, which decorated the inside of the White House. American Herstory was published August 2019.
D. Watkins is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of The Beast Side, The Cook Up, Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised, and We Speak for Ourselves—which was Enoch Pratt Free Library’s 2020 One Book Baltimore selection. His newest book, Black Boy Smile, was released in May.
Watkins is Editor-at-Large for Salon. He is a writer on the HBO mini-series We Own This City and hosts the show’s companion podcast. Additionally, he was featured in the HBO documentary, The Slow Hustle. His work has been published in the New York Times, Esquire, New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and other publications.
Watkins is a college lecturer at the University of Baltimore, where he earned an MFA in Creative Writing. He also holds a Master of Education degree from Johns Hopkins University.
Some of Watkins’ awards include the Johns Hopkins Distinguished Alumnus Award, the BMe Genius Grant for Dynamic Black Leaders, the City Lit Dambach Award for Service to the Literary Arts, the Maryland Library Association’s William Wilson Maryland Author Award, and Ford’s Men of Courage Award for Black Male Storytellers. He was also a finalist for a 2016 Hurston Wright Legacy Award, and The Cook Up was a 2017 Books for a Better Life finalist. He lives in Baltimore, MD with his wife and daughter.
Cara Ober is the founding editor and publisher at BmoreArt, Baltimore’s art and culture magazine.
Cara Ober writes about Baltimore’s unique cultural landscape from the perspective of an artist and feminist. She approaches all kinds of cultural production from a constructive and critical perspective informed by material and pop culture, history, social movements, and politics. Over the past decade, Ober’s critical reviews, essays, and interviews have explored the political and economic impact of the arts in Baltimore and the way artists maintain a professional practice and thrive in a city full of rich and diverse cultural traditions as well as serious social issues.
She writes regularly about artist and museum culture and and the way they intersect and collide, assessing how this impacts art communities and establishes hierarchies of value.
