Diamond Forde and Stephanie Powell Watts: poetry and fiction reading

The Class of 1952 and the Creative Writing Program at UNC Greensboro will host a poetry and fiction reading by Diamond Forde and Stephanie Powell Watts on Thursday, April 2nd at 6:00 PM in UNCG Alumni House. The reading is free and open to the public and will be preceded by a reception and book signing.

DIAMOND FORDE is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body, a Kate Tufts Discovery award nominee, and The Book of Alice, winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award. She has received a doctorate in Creative Writing at Florida State University, with a specialization in both African American poetics and fat studies, and an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Forde has received recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, nomination as a Kate Tufts Discovery award finalist, and has earned a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Obsidian, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the Interviews Editor for Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at North Carolina University.

STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for her debut story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need (2012), also named one of 2013’s Best Summer Reads by O: The Oprah Magazine. Her short fiction has been included in two volumes of the Best New Stories from the South anthology and honored with a Pushcart Prize. Ms. Powell Watts’s stories explore the lives of African Americans in fast food and factory jobs, working door to door as Jehovah’s Witness ministers, and pressing against the boundaries of the small town, post-integration South. Her debut novel, No One Is Coming to Save Us, follows the return of a successful native son to his home in North Carolina and his attempt to join the only family he ever wanted but never had. As Ms. Powell Watts describes it, “Imagine The Great Gatsby set in rural North Carolina, nine decades later, with desperate black people.” Born in the foothills of North Carolina, with a PhD from the University of Missouri and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she now lives with her husband and son in Pennsylvania where she is an associate professor at Lehigh University.