Marymount University and Day Eight are partnering on an event featuring the editors of Diaspora Cafe: D.C., a new anthology of poetry featuring writing on the AfroLatinx experience on Tuesday, October 25, 7:00 pm. 

Diaspora Café: D.C. is a collective investigation of survival by writers within a system that deprioritizes their existence. Editors Jeffrey Banks and Maritza Rivera will read their original poems featured in the anthology and discuss the process of editing the book. There will also be a Q&A portion to the event. 

The event will take place in the auditorium of the Ballston Center (1000 N Glebe Rd, Arlington, VA 22201) at Marymount University

JEFFREY BANKS is poetically known as “Big Homey.” His credits include: ESSENCE Magazine, Sirius/XM Satellite Radio, Radio-One Inc., the CBS Early Show, BLACK ENTERPRISE Magazine, performing nationwide, international broadcasts, multiple grant awards and publications through DC Public Libraries, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, Paris Lit Up, and Day Eight.

MARITZA RIVERA is a Puerto Rican poet and Army veteran who has lived in Rockville, MD since 1994. She has been writing poetry for over fifty years; is the creator of a short form of poetry called Blackjack and is the publisher of Casa Mariposa Press. Maritza is the author of About You; A Mother’s War, written during her son’s two tours in Iraq; Baker’s Dozen; Twenty-One: Blackjack Poems and creator of the Blackjack Poetry Playing Cards. Her work appears in literary magazines, anthologies and online publications and in the public arts project, Meet Me at the Triangle in Wheaton, MD. In 2011, Maritza began hosting the annual Mariposa Poetry Retreat, “where the magic of poetry happens”, which takes place in Puerto Rico in 2022.

A review by Angela Maria Spring in the Washington Review of Books says [the collection] “includes a wonderful arrangement of poems by our community’s poets from the African diaspora and touches on topics from celebrating Caribbean beats on DC streets to the struggle of anti-Blackness and racism from both white people and also from within African-American and Afro-Latinx communities.”

In a review by in Washington City Paper, Emma Veon writes, “Diaspora Café: D.C. celebrates and preserves difference, recognizing the breadth of Afro Latinx people who “embody many shades of a ‘Brown.’” Banks and Rivera assembled 34 poems from 14 writers in this intimate anthology representing the region’s dynamic Afro Latinx culture… The poems are by and about Afro Latinx creatives, and the collection, so intimate and honest, generously welcomes unfamiliar readers to a fictive cafe bustling with life.”