A Home for the Heart to Live In
Sunday, December 7, 2025 from 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Motor House Showroom
120 W North Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21201
In partnership, CityLit Project and the Motor House welcome featured Cave Canem fellow HOLLY BASS to A Home for the Heart to Live In. This heart-lifting event marks the 19th gathering of poetry fellows and poetry lovers, a convening that morphs into a singular experience. “Won’t you poet that?” Lucille Clifton often said that when she heard or felt something profound. CityLit has long believed it is one thing to read poetry in the quiet reflection in one’s own company, and quite another to hear it delivered in a roomful of word lovers, in a space that embraces the extraordinary along with the ordinary.
On Sunday, December 7th, along with our featured poet, and curated by REGINALD HARRIS, we welcome MAKALANI BANDELE, ABDUL ALI, HAYES DAVIS, TERI ELLEN CROSS DAVIS, STACY NATHANIEL JACKSON, ALAN KING, KATEEMA LEE, STEVEN LEYVA, SACHA MARVIN, LAUREN RUSSELL, and MALIK THOMPSON.
CityLit widens its doors and invites you to a splendid day of words, where promise and power take the stage by way of an ensemble of poets whose names you should know. Join us for a Sunday afternoon of poetry at the Motor House, a space that centers and nurtures creatives. We showcase a spectacular round-up of poets who will share their latest works. Featured poets at past gatherings have included Danez Smith, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Yona Harvey, Brionne Janae, Aja Monet, Evie Shockley, and Mahogany L. Browne, among others.
Greedy Reads is our event bookseller.
Holly Bass
Holly Bass is a socially-engaged artist working across multiple disciplines including dance, theater, visual art and writing. She has collaborated with governmental agencies, cultural institutions, nonprofit organizations and academic communities to create innovative artistic experiences that foster connection among groups of strangers. Her artwork can be found in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. She is a Cave Canem fellow (‘97-’99) and was a founding member of DC WritersCorps which sent her into schools, community centers and women’s shelters to teach poetry workshops. She received a 2024 Washington Award for art and social justice. She is currently the 2025-2026 Witt Visiting Artist at the University of Michigan, and a 2025-2026 Fellow with UM’s Center for Racial Justice.
Website: hollybass.com
Instagram: @hollybass360
Reginald Harris
Cave Canem Fellow and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for his first book, 10 Tongues, Reginald Harris won the 2012 Cave Canem / Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for his second collection, Autogeography. Member of the National Book Critics Circle, an At-Large Board Member of the Publishing Triangle, and recipient of Individual Artist Awards for poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, his work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and online including in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Poetry, This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, and Split This Rock’s The Quarry Social Justice Poetry Database. Born in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised in Baltimore, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is a Lead Digital Navigator for Brooklyn Public Library’s Neighborhood Tech Help service.
X: @rmharris
Instagram: @reginald.harris2
Abdul Ali
Poet, cultural worker, dreamer–Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping (2015). His writing has been published in several literary journals and anthologies. For his literary work, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Virgina Center for Creative Arts (VCCA) and Sewanee. Ali is currently a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of Maryland where he is studying poetics, Black visual culture, aesthetics, and social movements.
Website: abdulali.net
Instagram: @abdulalism
X: @abdulalism
makalani bandele
makalani bandele is the author of three poetry collections hellfightin’ (Willow Books`, 2011), under the aegis of a winged mind (Autumn House Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, and (jopappy and the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk (Futurepoem, 2024), winner of Futurepoem’s 2022 Other Futures Award. Known for his experimental poetics, mak is the winner of the 2023 Miracle Monocle Innovative Writing Award, and the 2021 First Prize in Experimental Poetry Contest from the Connecticut Poetry Society. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, the Kentucky Arts Council, Millay Colony, Obsidian Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. His work has been published in several anthologies and widely in both print and online literary journals. His poems, visual art, and essays can be found in or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Prairie Schooner, and DIAGRAM. He is a member of the Affrilachian Poets.
Website: makbandele.com
Instagram: @makbandele
Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union and Haint. Her fellowships and awards include The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, the Ohioana Book Award for Poetry, and a Maryland Individual Artist Award. She curated the O.B. Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. for almost twenty years. She will be the Nora Roberts Foundation Writer- in-Residence at Hood College in the spring of 2026. She lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their children.
Website: poetsandparents.com
Instagram: @cross_davis
Hayes Davis
Hayes Davis’ first volume, Let Our Eyes Linger was published by Poetry Mutual Press and his poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals. He served as the 2023-24 Howard County (Md) Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo) Writer in Residence, and won a 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Regional Independent Artists Award. Hayes recently began serving as the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at The Park School of Baltimore; he shares his creative and domestic life with his wife, poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis, and their children.
Website: poetsandparents.com
Instagram: @heydavis
Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
Stacy Nathaniel Jackson is a trans writer, poet, playwright, and visual artist originally from Los Angeles. His poems, plays, essays, and visual art have appeared in Callaloo, Electric Literature, Foglifter, Gay and Lesbian Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. His debut novel, The Ephemera Collector, was published by Liveright in 2025. His Afrofuturist play The Codex of Narma was a semi-finalist for the 2025 Eugene O’Neill National Playwright Conference and received a staged reading presented by the National Queer Theater. He has received support for his work as a Cave Canem poetry fellow, Hurston/Wright Foundation speculative fiction fellow, Jack Straw Cultural Center Writers Program fellow, Millay Arts Vincent Prize fellow, associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency #191 with Addae Moon in performance writing, and an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Website: snjackson.com
Instagram: @stayseajackson
Alan King
Alan King is a Caribbean American poet, photographer, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He’s a husband, father, and the author of Crooked Smiling Light, Point Blank, and DRIFT. King’s poetry earned praise from Joy Harjo, who called his work “a slow dance with someone you’re going to love forever." He lives with his family in Bowie, Maryland.
Website: alanwking.com
X: @awking020881
Instagram: @awking020881
Kateema Lee
Kateema Lee is the author of three chapbooks: Almost Invisible, Musings of a Netflix Binge Viewer, and Mundane Things. Her full collection, Transcript of the Unnamed, explores joy, identity, violence, and the “brief, bright lives” of missing and forgotten Black women in Washington, D.C.
Instagram: @katleeme2
Steven Leyva
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook, which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. His second book of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, was published by Blair Publishing in Spring 2025. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor and co-director of the Klein Family Center of Communications Design.
Instagram: @sdleyva
Sacha Marvin
Sacha Marvin is a writer, performer and urban designer from Tidewater, Virginia. A recipient of fellowships from Callaloo and Cave Canem, Marvin’s written work can be found in The Adroit Journal, Split this Rock, EcoTheo Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Marvin has been a finalist or semi-finalist for prizes for poetry and screenwriting at The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Frontier Poetry, Black Lawrence Press, Glass Poetry, Two Sylvia’s Press, the Vail Film Festival and the Richmond International Film Festival. Sacha Marvin currently resides in Washington DC.
Instagram: @Noonevening
Lauren Russell
Lauren Russell is a poet and writer in hybrid forms. She is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024); Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). An NEA and Cave Canem fellow, Russell has received residencies from Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Website: laurenrussellpoet.com
Malik Thompson
Malik Thompson (he/they) is a queer African-American person from Washington, DC. Having worked in independent bookstores for many years, he is also the former Co-Chair of OutWrite DC and has taught workshops for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and other organizations. His work has been published in the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, the Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and residencies from organizations including Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, the Anderson Center, and Monson Arts.
Instagram: @latesummerstar