Riverfront Readings features Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Victoria Garton, and Jermaine Thompson

Please join us for our April 12th Zoom reading featuring Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Victoria Garton and Jermaine Thompson.

To attend, please register for the reading at https://squoom.com/z/rf240412, and you will be provided with the information needed to join the reading. (Note that this reading begins an hour earlier than our usual time.)

Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley immigrated to the United States with her family during the 14-year Liberian civil war. For more than two decades, Wesley’s poetry has given voice to the voiceless, the hundreds of thousands of Liberian war dead through its exploration of themes on the plight of the refugee of war, the new African Diaspora mother/wife and African femininity, motherhood, home, displacement, and the survivor as witness. She is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, The River is Rising, and Becoming Ebony. She is a Professor of English at Penn State Altoona.

Victoria Garton’s books are Venice Comes Clean (Flying Ketchup Press, 2023), Pout of Tangerine Tango (Finishing Line Press, 2022), and Kisses in the Raw Night (BkMk Press,1989.) Her poems are included in the anthologies From K.C., MO to East St. Lou and the upcoming Of Our Own Accord. Recent acceptances are from Cosmic Daffodil, I-70 Review, Proud to Be, Sparks of Calliope, WayWords Literary Journal, The Penwood Review, The Seraphic Review, Thorny Locust, and Vital Minutiae. She retired from teaching composition at Crowder College in 2020.

Born in Louisville, Mississippi, Jermaine Thompson learned language from big-armed women who greased their skillets with gossip and from full-bellied men who cursed and prayed with the same fervor. He’s been writing poetry since he was 13— inspired by having to memorize Langston Hughes’ Harlem for a Black History Program at his Presbyterian church home. Jermaine loves language for what it creates, what it destroys, what it binds in heaven, & what it looses on earth. Jermaine is an educator who has publications in The Pinch, Memorious, Whale Road Review, Southern Indiana Review, and New Letters.