Join the Museum of African American History for an evening with January Gill O’Neil, author of Glitter Road, a Massachusetts Book Awards Honors title in poetry. O’Neil will read from her celebrated collection and speak about the legacy of Phillis Wheatley alongside the landscape of contemporary Black women’s poetry in Boston and across Massachusetts before opening the floor for an audience Q&A and book signing.
Glitter Road opens in the wake of loss, deep pain, and anger, yet the poems insist on finding flashes of celebration and joy—even if that joy is simply, in the spirit of Lucille Clifton, “what i have shaped into / a kind of life,” the triumph of survival and self-recognition. With formal dexterity and richly charged syntax, O’Neil’s poems resist the silences of fear, grief, desire, and anxiety, speaking aloud what is so often left unspoken in both private and public life. Her interrogations of race thread through the collection, shaping a speaker whose history—personal and collective—unfolds with carefully rendered detail.
This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
JANUARY GILL O’NEIL is a poet and author of Glitter Road, Rewilding, Misery Islands, and Underlife. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other publications. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, among others. O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and lives in Massachusetts.