Booking and details
Coming SoonDates Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3pm
Venue Learning Lab and Theatre
Tickets Free; registration required
Join award-winning poet María Fernanda (published in The Rumpus, Luna Luna Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4) for an afternoon workshop and an evening reading. Originally from Northeast DC, she has crafted literary experiences for audiences internationally in Hamburg, Germany; Moscow, Russia; Nice, France; Nikiti, Greece; and numerous US cities.
Workshop: 3-4pm
During the afternoon, María Fernanda will host a poetry workshop with generative writing exercises in the Learning Lab. Inspired by the Folger’s collection of Shakespeare’s First Folios, this workshop invites participants to compose their own poems using her writing prompts and to bind their own three-sheet folio.
Reading: 5:30-6:30pm
In the evening, María Fernanda will take the stage in the Theatre to read poems from her own work and from the poets who have influenced her (Nikki Giovanni, Robin Coste Lewis, and others), and will present the poems created earlier in the day by workshop participants.
About the poet
María Fernanda
María Fernanda (she/hers) is a poet whose work explores the intimacy of sisterhood, the anchor of intergenerational coexistence, and grief. Awarded the Norma Elia Cantú Award in Creative Writing and the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry, María Fernanda performs her original poetry across the United States, including at the National Gallery of Art’s Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985, the Brooklyn Museum’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, and more. Internationally, María Fernanda read her work to audiences in Nikiti, Moscow, and Hamburg. Her works appear in The Healing Verse Poetry Line, Cave Canem’s Dogbytes, the Hill Rag, and Cheryl Clarke’s born in a bed of good lessons: poems inspired by the works of Lucille Clifton. María Fernanda is a Callaloo fellow.
Join us for more poetry readings
Explore the 2026/27 season.