Members: Free; General Admission: $15: Students/Seniors: $7.50

Join us for an intimate evening of poetry in the galleries with Safia Jama, whose luminous, image-rich poems explore memory, migration, and place. In dialogue with the exhibition Uman: After all the things …, Jama will read a selection of poems that respond to Uman’s exuberant color, calligraphic gesture, and layered abstraction offering language to the works on view.

The evening begins with a casual cocktail mingle, followed by an introduction to the exhibition by Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart and the poetry reading by Safia Jama. Informal conversation with the poet and guests will unfold before and after the reading in the galleries.

Safia Jama was born to a Somali father and an Irish American mother in Queens, New York. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she has published poetry in Ploughshares, Boston Review, World Literature Today, Spoken Black Girl, and Poem-a-Day. Her poetry has also been featured on WNYC’s Morning Edition and CUNY TV’s Shades of US series. Jama was a semi-finalist in the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and she is the author of Notes on Resilience, included in the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set (Akashic Books, 2020). Her full-length poetry collection, Crowded House, is published with Beltway Editions (2023).