Poet, performance artist, musician, and publisher Jayne Cortez left an indelible mark on American letters and writers across the globe. Sharp and incisive, her words speak ferociously about material longing, intimacy, violence, and that which is often left unsaid, encapsulating undeniably human experiences with candor and directness. With an expansive lens, she could equally absorb the reader in prosaic moments of everyday life and telescope out to wider global and historical crises, often connected to the various aftermaths of colonialism around the world. Cortez was a veritable firespitter, uncoincidentally the name she chose for her band, one of many forms of creative expression throughout her long career. At the same time, her activism and organizing— particularly her cofounding of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) in 1991—harnessed a collective fervor to connect and advance the work of diasporic artists and scholars. To celebrate the release of Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez (2025), published by Nightboat Books, OWWA members will reflect on their relationships with Cortez, read her work, and assess her ongoing impact on vital conversations in literature and culture today.

The Organization of Women Writers of Africa, Inc (OWWA) was founded by Jayne Cortez in the United States and Ama Ata Aidoo in Ghana in 1991. Both a nongovernmental organization associated with the United Nations Department of Public Information and a literary nonprofit, OWWA seeks to advance the literature of women writers from Africa and its diaspora. OWWA’s achievements include the international conferences Yari Yari: Black Women Writers and the Future (1997) and Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writers Dissecting Globalization (2004). OWWA also co-coordinated the first symposiums in the United States to be a part of the UNESCO Route of the Slave Project, Slave Routes: The Long Memory (1997), followed by Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition and Creative Progress (2008). All programs were held in New York except for the last Yari Yari, which took place in Accra, Ghana, in 2013. These large-scale international events brought together hundreds of intellectuals from over 25 countries, with several thousand people attending live and many more viewing through televised sessions. All OWWA programs have been documented on film and are available in the OWWA archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York. In recent years, OWWA organized critical panels, conversations, readings, book celebrations, literary awards, and screenings as well as a literary-literacy project connecting students to literature and professional writers.

About the Artists:

Denardo Coleman made his debut on drums at the age of ten on The Empty Foxhole, an album by his father, musician Ornette Coleman, with Charlie Haden in 1966. Coleman continued to play on and produce several of his father’s recordings until the 2006 SoundGrammar, which won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1980, Coleman and his mother, poet Jayne Cortez, formed the Firespitters, a band designed to collaborate with Cortez’s revolutionary poetry. They made several records over the course of 30 years, including Taking the Blues Back Home, issued by Harmolodic and Verve Records in 1996. Coleman has recorded and produced music with numerous other artists, including Bang on a Can, Sonny Rollins, Patti Smith, and Cecil Taylor.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs was born and raised in New York. She is an interdisciplinary poet, sound artist, and author of TwERK (2013) and Village (2023), among other titles, as well as an independent curator, artistic director, and producer. Diggs’s work is truly hybrid: Languages and modes are grafted together and furl out insistently from each bound splice. Diggs has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), a Whiting Award (2016), and a C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art (2020), in addition to grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, Howard Foundation, and the Japan–United States Friendship Commission. Diggs lives in New York.

Melvin Edwards was born in Houston in 1937. He moved to Los Angeles in 1955, where he attended the University of Southern California, and then on to New York in 1967. For over 50 years, he has used suggestive materials and poetic titles to bring out the sociopolitical possibilities of formal sculptures. After learning to weld in 1960, he began assembling knives, chains, and other recognizable metal objects into the modestly sized, abstract sculptural reliefs that would come to be known as the Lynch Fragment series (1964– ). In parallel, the artist has steadily worked with paper, making impressions on its surface with metal and pigments. His work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (1993); the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York (2015); and Fridericianum, Kassel (2024–25), which traveled to Kunsthalle Bern (2025), Switzerland, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2025–26). He has also realized many public-art commissions. From 1972 to 2002, Edwards taught at Rutgers University in Newark. In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston.

J.e. Franklin is a playwright, activist, educator, and graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. Best known for her play Black Girl:From Genesis to Revelations (1969), which was made into a feature film in 1972, Franklin has written over one hundred plays in various genres. Her full-length works have been published in several anthologies, including Black Drama in America (1994), Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 1993 (1994), The Best American Short Plays 1994–95 (1995), and Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (1997). Franklin’s short plays may be seen monthly on her Zoom series, directed by actress Malika Nzinga. Among other honors, in 2024, the City University of New York’s Lehman College awarded Franklin an honorary Doctor of Letters.

Rashidah Ismaili is a fiction writer, playwright, poet, and cultural critic. Her work has been widely anthologized and is featured in New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby (2019). She is the author of the poetry collection Cantata for Jimmy (2004), the play Rice Keepers (2006), and the novel Autobiography of the Lower East Side (2014). Born and raised in Cotonou, Benin, Ismaili is the creator of Salon d’Afrique, which she has hosted at her apartment in Harlem for over 40 years. A retired academic and founding faculty of the creative writing MA/MFA at Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Ismaili is a recipient of a 2025 Clara Lemlich Award for social activism.

Rosamond S. King is a poet and scholar. Her books include Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (2014), winner of the Caribbean Studies Association’s Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award, as well as the poetry collections Rock | Salt | Stone (2017),which won a Lambda Award, and All the Rage (2021). Her performances have been presented internationally, including at the AFiRIperFORMA Biennial, Harare, Zimbabwe; Bocas Lit Fest, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and VIVA! Festival, Manchester. King is the Carol L. Zicklin Honors Academy Chair at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

Fay Victor is a sound artist and bandleader. She uses performance, improvisation, and composition to examine representations of modern life and blackness. Victor has released 13 critically acclaimed albums as a leader and performed with luminaries such as George E. Lewis, Nicole Mitchell, Moor Mother, and Archie Shepp. A member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Victor codirects its educational wing, Ensemble Evolution. On faculty at the College of Performing Arts at the New School, New York, and at Long Island University, Brooklyn, Victor was a visiting professor at Harvard University, Cambridge, in spring 2025. Additionally, Victor is the chair of the board for the Jazz Leaders Fellowship, a Brooklyn Conservatory of Music initiative to fund black women/nonbinary musicians as jazz leaders of the present and future.