Dark Room Collective Summary

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The Dark Room Collective was founded in Boston in 1988 by a group of African American poets led by Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange. The mission of the Collective was to form a community of established and emerging African American writers. Major Jackson, John Keene, Janice Lowe, Carl Phillips, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Artress Bethany White, and Kevin Young were also members of this group.

Originally conceived as a reading series, the Collective became a small community of poets. Strange wrote, “It was the sustaining practice of writing in community just as much as the activism of building a community-based reading series for writers of color that kept us engaged in collectivity” (Painted Bride Quarterly 60).

The Collective invited a diverse group of writers with different aesthetics and at different points in their careers, including Young and Smith, who both joined while undergraduates at Harvard University. Visiting writers and early readers in the series included Elizabeth Alexander, Cornelius Eady, Martín Espada, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Alice Walker, among others.
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Eady compared it to “being part of a Sunday revival meeting. A crowd showed up (I couldn’t tell who actually lived there and who didn’t), some furniture got moved, some chairs unfolded and pow! Their living room turned into a salon… that’s how they all seemed to take it: with a serious joy and pride in their belief in being black and being wordy, which totally disarmed