The East Side Freedom Library invites you to a special evening with Mary Moore Easter and her new poetry collection Free Papers: Inspired by the Testimony of Eliza Winston, A Mississippi Slave Escaped to Freedom in Minnesota in 1860.

Register here to join the event on Zoom or watch live on ESFL’s Facebook page.

Mary Moore Easter is the author of The Body of the World (Minnesota Book Award in Poetry Finalist, 2019); Walking from Origins; From the Flutes of Our Bones (Nodin Press 2020), and Free Papers: poems inspired by the testimony of Eliza Winston, a Mississippi slave, escaped to freedom in Minnesota in 1860. (Finishing Line Press 2021) A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, Cave Canem Fellow, veteran dancer /choreographer, and emerita professor of dance at Carleton College, Easter is the mother of two daughters and four grandchildren.

Poet Danez Smith writes: “Mary Moore Easter’s Free Papers is dreaming in the archives. Through poems that document and redocument the life of Eliza Winston paired beside poems that reach across time to unite Black women in their quest to rapture the self from the prisons of nation and whiteness, Easter has built a hall of mirrors where one can come out of the other side free, transformed. Here, documents morph like a mind suddenly free from its last shackle. The poetry, freedom’s promise, knows no bounds.”

As a special treat, for “Winslow House: A Script for Three Voices,” Mary will be joined by her daughter Allison Easter (Based in NY, Allison Easter was the first American woman in Stomp and has performed with MacArthur awardees Susan Marshall and Meredith Monk, in Law & Order and in Will Pomerantz’s adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities.) and Siddeqah Shabazz (Originally from Oakland, CA, with degrees in theater from the University of La Verne in Southern California and the Guildford School of Acting in England, she has worked in the Twin Cities with Climb, Shadow Horse, Gadfly, Chain Reaction, Freshwater, and 20% Theaters, Exposed Brick Theatre, Savage Umbrella, Aniccha Arts, Intermedia Arts, Artistry, Underdog Theatre, Transatlantic Love Affair, and Full Circle Theatre.)

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