Words as Worlds / justBook-ish

Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who writes, lives and organizes in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator, and curator who uses Afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an individual world poetry slam champion and the founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival. Olayiwola is the 2021 artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and a 2020 poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Porsha Olayiwola is currently teaching as an assistant poetry professor at Emerson College. She is the author of I Shimmer Sometimes, too. olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston and a recently appointed trustee at the Boston Public Library. Her work can be found in or forthcoming from Triquarterly magazine, black warrior review, The Boston Globe, Essence magazine, Redivider, Split This Rock, the NBA, the Academy of American Poets, Netflix, The Rumpus, Wilderness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere. 

She co-founded JustBook-ish and Words as Worlds, a literary gathering space in Dorchester.