Join us at Deep Vellum Books on April 25th, 2025 at 7pm as W.J. (Will) Lofton, an alumnus of 100W from 2022 based in Atlanta presents his new poetry collection titled Boy Maybe published by Beacon Press, releasing March 25, alongside and in conversation with esteemed poet, Tarfia Faizullah.
W.J. Lofton, a Chicago-born poet and Alabama raised multimodal artist, is the author of A Garden for Black Boys Between the Stages of Soil and Stardust and his newest collection boy maybe (Beacon Press, Spring 2025). A recipient of Ava DuVernay's LEAP Grant and an artist-in-residency at 100West, Lofton has earned fellowships from Cave Canem and Emory University. His work has been featured or forthcoming in TIME, wildness, Obsidian, Scalawag, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, American Poets Magazine, Prose to the People, No Justice, No Peace: From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter, and film festivals nationwide. Lofton’s constant concern is liberation and its lived manifestations; the personal, political, and collective. He resides in Atlanta, Georgia where he co-curates Rebellion: A Writing Salon, a space devoted to cultivating diasporic voices.
W.J. Lofton
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Hindu Business Line, Poetry Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, Tarfia presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide, and has been featured at the the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere. Her writing is translated into Bengali, Persian, Chinese, and Tamil, and is part of the theater production Birangona: Women of War. Born in Brooklyn, NY to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas, Tarfia currently lives in Dallas.
