Welcome Table Talk - Thinking About Love and the Divine

Torch Literary Arts and the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective present the latest installment of Welcome Table Talk - Thinking About Love and the Divine with DaMaris Hill and Ajanaé Dawkins, moderated by Amanda Johnston. Recorded on October 21, 2025.

DaMaris B. Hill is a poet and creative scholar. Her most recent book, "Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood," is deemed “urgent” and “luminous” in a starred Publisher’s Weekly review. Hill’s first poetry collection, "A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing," is a powerful narrative-in-verse that bears witness to Black women burdened by incarceration. It was an Amazon #1 Best Seller in African American Poetry, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title, and 2020 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Hill’s other books include "The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland," and "\Vi-zə-bəl\ \Teks-chərs\ (Visible Textures)." Her digital work, “Shut Up In My Bones”, is a twenty-first century poem that uses remix/pastiche/intertextuality to honor a specific cultural past, while working to construct visions of a better future. Her next book, a memoir entitled "Blood Bible: An American History," will be published with Bloomsbury in 2027. Similar to her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. She was a 2024-2025 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and a fellow with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Hill is Chair and Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature, at her alma mater, Morgan State University.

Ajanaé Dawkins is a poet, conceptual artist and theologian. She works through poetry, visual art, performance, and audio to explore the politics of faith, grief, and intimate relationships between Black women. As a theologian, she blends cultural criticism, memoir, and theology as autotheory to consider the relationship between Black church history, spirituality, and creation. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, Frontier Poetry, The BreakBeat Poets Black Girl Magic Anthology and more. Her solo-exhibition, No One Teaches Us How To Be Daughters, debuted at Urban Arts Space in 2024. Her chapbook, "BLOOD-FLEX," won the New Delta Review’s Chapbook prize and is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Ajanaé has performed for the United Nations Secretary of Sexual Violence in Conflict. She contributed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Poetry is Not a Luxury project, led by Ama Codjoe. Her work has been featured on PBS, For Harriet, and Def Jam. She is the winner of the Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Editors Prize. She was the Taft Museum’s 2022 Duncanson Artist in Residence and is a fellow of Torch Literary Arts, The Watering Hole, and Pink Door. Ajanaé is currently a co-host of the VS Podcast with the Poetry Foundation, Ohio State University’s UAS Community Artist-in-Residence, and the Theology Editor for the EcoTheo Review.

This event was made possible with support from the City of Austin Economic Development Division, the Burdine Johnson Foundation, the Austin Community Foundation, the Texas Commission on the Arts, Poetry Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.