Dogfish Reading Series launches 2016 season with Mixed Company on Jan. 21

The Dogfish Reading Series presents their first event of the year featuring writers from Mixed Company at 7:30 pm on Thursday, Jan. 21, at Dogfish headquarters (2448 N. Villere St).

Doors open at 7 pm. Featured readers will include Addie Citchens, Jeri Hilt, Ambata Kazi-Nance, and Kristina Kay Robinson. The open mic will begin at 8:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public.

Written, designed, and edited by women of color, Mixed Company is a collection of literary fiction and visual art offered as an expression of contemporary Black thought. Its contributors are representative of diasporic communities engaging in their radical traditions. Chinua Achebe said, “It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.” From the city of New Orleans, the narratives were united to assert undeniably that women of color remain.

Based in New Orleans, Addie Citchens is a fiction writer from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Her work covers the performance of blackness, sexuality, sexual violence, generational trauma, and personal healing/liberation/triumph. Her art has been featured in the Oxford American, Callaloo, and Mixed Company.

Jeri Hilt is a film maker, artistic photographer, and writer. She is also a former lecturer of African Studies and International Development issues at Tennessee State and Dillard Universities. She has also worked with research, development, and teaching projects in South Sudan, Kenya, Burundi, and the United Kingdom. She is a Louisiana native with ties to New Orleans, Central Louisiana (Avoyelles Parish) and Shreveport, Louisiana.

Ambata Kazi-Nance is a writer, teacher, and doula born and raised in New Orleans. She is an MFA student at UNO and writes for Love, InshAllah, a love and relationship blog for Muslim women, Grow Mama Grow, a Muslim parenting blog, and Azizah Magazine.

Kristina Kay Robinson is a writer, visual artist and malcontent, born and raised in native in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the co-editor of Mixed Company, a collection of short fiction by women of color. Her work has appeared in The Baffler, Guernica and The Nation among other outlets. Navigating the spiritual geography of Blackness, indigeneity, Sufism, and movement are her current (pre)occupations.