Find Your Way Home: How We Poet Our Path & Our Past: A Conversation & Reading with Chet’la Sebree, Maui Smith, Noel Quiñones, featuring Denice Frohman. Moderated by DuEwa Frazier
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
CityLit Stage
East 31st Street & Barclay Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
Home can be a journey or a place, figurative or literal, an interior search of belonging, and a destination. Either way, the word – which we dare not let hold us hostage to any single definition – evokes in each of us, a sense of longing and becoming, of territory and consequence. Five poets take us on their singular journeys with a conversation on their new works, one-woman shows, poet-written essays, spoken word, and deliberate declarations of vulnerability and courage. Anchored by Philly-based poet Denice Frohman—a poet, performer, and former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion who is currently touring her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, centering the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, and more. Celebrated poet, essayist, scholar Chet’la Sebree, in her illuminating work Turn W(here): A Geography of Home, speaks to “perfecting the art of leaving’ and rearranging the definition of home, of who we belong to and where. Imani Perry calls it, “An intimate rendering of the life of a Black woman artist.” Poet Maui Smith’s work has appeared in Club Plum Literary Journal, The Oyster River Pages, Electric Literature, Equinox Journal, among others. Called a poet of abundance by Willie Perdomo, Emmy-award winner Noel Quiñones’ new work Orange, reads “like in-person, figurative epiphanies … a palette’s “thousands of unnamed colors” that cut to the white meat of truth.” Orange, where every page hums “with the music of what it means to be alive and brown and queer and brilliant in a world that too often forgets to see you whole … the ache of moving toward a future full of rowdy song,” writes Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Educator, award-winning poet, digital storyteller, and moderator DuEwa Frazier is the editor of the Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape in Black Literature & Arts, and author of Goddess Under the Bridge: Poems, and more. Join us for this special CityLit Stage presentation with prized poets, where we allow ourselves to create dangerously: an enlightening conversation and poetry reading where we push back against the world’s forgetting.
Denice Frohman is a poet and performer from New York City. She has received support from The Pew Center for the Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poem-A-Day (The Academy of American Poets), The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she has featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Currently, she is performing her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, which centers the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders.
denicefrohman.com
Instagram: @denicefrohman
Chet’la Sebree is the author of the debut essay collection Turn (W)Here: A Geography Of Home, “exquisitely observed and multifaceted,” “an intricate map of one woman’s search for home … deeply rooted in history,” writes Lilly Dancyger. Her poetry collection Blue Opening, longlisted for PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry; Field Study, winner of the James Laughlin Award; and Mistress, nominated for an NAACP Image Award and selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. She’s an associate professor at George Washington University and teaches in Randolph College’s MFA in Creative Writing program.
chetlasebree.com
Instagram: @cnsebree
X: @Nahtil
Maui Smith is a poet from Cleveland, Ohio. They earned their MFA in Poetry at Hood College and edited the inaugural issue of their graduate student literary magazine, Pergola. Their work has appeared in Club Plum Literary Journal, The Oyster River Pages, Electric Literature, Equinox Journal, and has been anthologized in Porch Water Press’ The Water Behind Us: An Anthology for a New World.
www.mauismith.com
Instagram: @mintmaui
Noel Quiñones is an Emmy Award-winning writer of all genres, and the author of Orange. He has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poem-a-day, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT anthology, as well as the Michigan Quarterly Review, in which they won the 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. His short story “This Time and the Next” will be included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners. He has also written for, narrated, and acted in several films, including the Emmy-nominated documentary Takeover, recounting the Young Lords’ 1970 takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to fight for better healthcare. A graduate of the University of Mississippi’s MFA program, Noel is currently a JFMS Screenwriting Lab Fellow working on their first TV show, The Telescope.
www.noelpquinones.com
Instagram: @noelpquinones
Dr. DuEwa Frazier is an award-winning poet, writer, scholar, consultant, digital storyteller, educator, and speaker. She is the author or editor of poetry collections, children’s stories, scholarly volumes, and creative nonfiction, including Alice’s Musical Debut, Quincy Rules, Goddess Under the Bridge: Poems, and more. Her writing has been published by Routledge, IGI Global, Essence, Black Renaissance Noire, Tidal Basin Review, Arlington Literary Journal, Poetry in Performance, Drumvoices Revue, and others. She is the founder/creator of Lit Noire Publishing, Nerdacity Podcast, Afrofutures Pod, Black Scholars in Podcasting, and Never Scared Writers & Academics. She has received fellowships from the Hurston Wright Foundation, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Rutgers Center for MSIs. DuEwa earned an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School and holds several other advanced degrees.
www.duewafrazier.com
Instagram: @duewafrazier, @blkscholarspodcasting
X: @duewafrazier1