Kimbilio Fellows to Read at Write On

Angie Chatman.

Write On, Door County will present a special reading and conversation with three women writers from Kimbilio, a national organization for fiction writers from the African diaspora. 

The free reading will take place Tuesday, Oct. 17 at 6:30 pm at the Judville center for writing and storytelling. 

Tara Betts, Angie Chatman and Camille Forbes are fellows with Kimbilio, which means “safe haven” in Swahili. The writers were selected by Kimbilio’s board for a one-week residency to focus on their art at Write On’s residency house.

A poet as well as a fiction writer, Betts was the inaugural Poet for the People at University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. In addition to writing new fiction, she is working on poems for her second collection with Peggy Choy Dance Company, and co-editing an anthology of Bop Poems with Affa M. Weaver.

Chatman’s stories and essays can be found in Brevity, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She has read on The Moth Radio Hour and won a WEBBY award for reading on GBH/World Channel’s Stories from the Stage. Born and raised on Chicago’s southside, she now lives in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston.

Camille Forbes holds an MA in History and a Ph.D in American Civilization from Harvard University. She is the author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star, a critical biography reassessing the illustrious career of the misunderstood 19th-century Afro-Caribbean blackface comedian. Her current novel is set during the Civil War. She is an associate professor in the literature department at the University of California, San Diego.

Write On, Door County is located at 4210 Juddville Road in Fish Creek.