Join The Writer’s Desk for a special live event this Black History Month! “The Stories We Carry—Writing Remembrance, Radiance & Resilience” premieres on February 19, 2026, with authors Carole Boston Weatherford (Kin: Rooted in Hope), Amber McBride (We Are All So Good at Smiling), and Sharon G. Flake (Once in a Blue Moon), moderated by Carla Du Pree, an AWP board member and the executive director of CityLit Project in Baltimore, Maryland.

Panelists will discuss uplifting and amplifying Black voices, writing about frequently erased or misrepresented topics such as slavery and mental health in the Black community, and the importance of sharing Black stories, especially in difficult times in present-day society.

This online event on YouTube is free and open to all. It begins at 7:00 p.m. ET and will last an hour, with a Q&A at the end if time allows. Be sure to check out our list of books by the authors on Bookshop.org.

Moderator Bio

Carla Du Pree is a fiction writer; a local, state, and national arts advocate; and executive director of Baltimore’s esteemed literary nonprofit, CityLit Project, known for its CityLit Festival, CityLit Stage at the Baltimore Book Festival, CityLit Studio, and A Home for the Heart to Live In. In her role with CityLit, she cofounded Scribente Maternum and the Write Like a Mother Retreat and created Gladiators, a professional mentorship program. She’s received literary fellowships from the Peter Bullough Foundation, Hedgebrook, Baldwin for the Arts, Rhode Island Writers Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (twice) for her work. She’s the recipient of several awards based on her fiction and her investment in the arts community, a Rubys through the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, the 2020 National Assembly of State Arts Agencies’ inaugural Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award, and most recently the 2025 Cultural Innovator Award (Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance). She serves on the executive committees of several boards, is an advisory editor with The Hopkins Review, and is a cultural ambassador for issues related to the arts with the intention of amplifying the literary arts in all manner of ways, while magnifying diversity, equity, and inclusion work. She is married to her partner of forty-seven years and has three grown children (twin boys and a daughter), a beloved grandson, and dogs who fill and fuel her life.

Panelist Bios

Sharon G. Flake is the author of the groundbreaking novel The Skin I’m In, which brought a bold dimension to literature for young readers. Now considered a modern classic, the book is used in classrooms worldwide and studied by experts in education and literature. Flake has authored over a dozen books, with more than 1.8 million in print globally. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, including Korean, Italian, French, and Portuguese. “My goal is to get young people reading, with well-written, fast paced, character driven novels that young people see themselves in, no matter where they live on the planet.”

Amber McBride is an award-winning author and poet who writes for both children and adults—often referring to herself as a folklorist. She is also an herbalist and practices Hoodoo (an African American folk-magick practice). McBride was an assistant professor for a decade at the University of Virginia and James Madison University before she started writing full-time. McBride’s poetry has been published in several literary magazines, including Ploughshares, Blackbird, Willow Springs Magazine, On Being, Rust & Moth, and many others. Her debut young adult novel, Me (Moth) was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the 2022 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for new talent, among many other accolades. Her sophomore novel, We Are All So Good at Smiling, was critically acclaimed, garnering five starred reviews. McBride’s middle grade debut, Gone Wolf, was also well received and went on to win the LA Times Book Award in Children’s Literature. Her adult poetry collection, Thick with Trouble, was called, “a beautiful web of interconnected pieces relating to her identity as a Black woman in the modern era,” by the Harvard Crimson. McBride earned her MFA with a concentration in poetry from Emerson College in Boston and went on to intern at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, where she helped to put on programs honoring Black poets and writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. Amber McBride believes in magick, Hoodoo, ghosts, and all the things you can’t see, but most of all she believes in you!

The daughter of a printer, Carole Boston Weatherford was practically born with ink in her blood. She began writing at age six and soon after saw her poems in print. Her eighty-plus books have garnered two NAACP Image Awards and eighteen American Library Association Youth Media Awards, including a Newbery Honor, a Coretta Scott King Award, and four Caldecott Honors. Her career achievements have been recognized with the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Nonfiction Award from the Children’s Book Guild, and induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. A retired English professor, she lives in Maryland.