Come celebrate the launch of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s collected poems The Limitless Heart.

Encompassing the breadth of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s astounding career, The Limitless Heart is a time capsule of the boundless love, care, grief, and fortitude that make her work so stirring.

With deep empathy, thoughtfulness, charisma, and lyricism, Boyce-Taylor’s work explores questions of immigration, motherhood, and queer sensuality, among other themes. Grief is both an anchor and a door throughout Boyce-Taylor’s poetry, as seen in Mama Phife Represents, a hybrid of memoir and verse on the death of her son, Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest. Questions regarding Blackness and Black womanhood in the United States are stitched throughout her books, and Boyce-Taylor leans into a more overtly defiant political register in her latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets, while maintaining the connective spine of the Trinidadian dialect that appears throughout all her work. Selections from these books, as well as her other poetry collections, appear in this new volume.

Curated from Boyce-Taylor’s body of work, The Limitless Heart encapsulates her progression as a writer throughout the decades of her highly successful career.

Get The Limitless Heart from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/...------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Speakers

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet and teaching artist. She earned an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine and an MSW from Fordham University. Her collections of poetry include Raw Air (2000), Night When Moon Follows (2000), Convincing the Body (2005), and Arrival (2017), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Mama Phife Represents (2021) won the 2022 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry by The Publishing Triangle. We Are Not Wearing Helmets (2022) was nominated for the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her life papers and portfolio are stored at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Glenis Redmond is the First Poet Laureate of Greenville, South Carolina. She is a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, and a Cave Canem alumni. She has authored six books of poetry: Backbone, Under the Sun, What My Hand Say, Listening Skin, Three Harriets & Others, and Praise Songs for Dave the Potter (artwork by Jonathan Green). Glenis received the Governor’s Award and was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She was recently a recipient of the Peacemaker Award by the Upstate Mediation Center in 2022. Her poetry has been showcased on NPR and PBS and has been most recently published in Orion Magazine, storySouth and The New York Times, as well as numerous literary journals nationally and internationally.

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