Bird in Hand is honored to host this public event with David Mills and Aja Lans, which is a collaboration between the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, the Krieger First-Year Seminars, and the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts. David Mills’ BONEYARN is a poetry collection like none other, turning Mills’ singular poetic eye to New York’s African Burial Ground, America’s oldest and largest cemetery for enslaved people. BONEYARN was the winner of the 2022 North American Book Award.

In the words of Alan Shapiro, “Mills combines a novelist’s love of character with a poet’s pitch perfect ear for idiom and eye for unforgettable detail” to create a book that “laments and affirms or finds in lamentation a complicated form of affirmation.”

It raises essential questions about the poetic imagination as a tool of historicization, and we are thrilled that Dr. Aja Lans of the Department of Anthropology and Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University will join Mills in conversation. We hope you can join us.

RSVP Here!

Hosted by the Ivy Bookshop at Bird in Hand Coffee & Books, 11 E. 33rd St., Baltimore, MD. Learn more here.