Published authors Desiree McCray and Diego Báez will read their poetry and answer questions about their craft on Thursday, November 14 at 2 p.m. in the Lee E. Dulgar Gallery on the first floor of the Main Campus. This event is sponsored by the Scriblerian and the Writing Center. It is open to the public, a book signing will follow, and light refreshments will be served.

More about the authors:

Desiree McCray (she/they) hails from Chicago, Illinois. A womanist scholar and prophetic scribe, she crafts essays, poetry, and scholarly research, delving into themes of race, gender, bodies, and class, at the intersection of Black religion and culture. McCray released three collections of poems: My Sisters Look Like God: A Womanist Manifesto of Poetry (2024), Hope Among Other Foods: A Concoction of Fat Girl Poetry (2021), and Send A Refreshing: Poetic Prayers of an Intercessor (2023). Their work is forthcoming in Femme Literati: Mixtape Anthology for Black Women Edition Three by Genre: Urban Arts. Black Feminist Collective, Gal’s Guide Anthology, RAGE Zine, and several other anthologies echo her womanist words this year. Armed with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia, McCray fulfills her calling as a writer, minister of justice, and educator. Desiree McCray graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, NJ, earning a Master’s in Divinity. She is enrolled at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in a DMin program focused on Public Theology and Creative Writing.

Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (Univ. Arizona, 2024), a finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the Berkshire Prize for Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, the Poetry Foundation Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, and DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Diego has served on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle, the International David Foster Wallace Society, and Families Together Cooperative Nursery School. Poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Freeman’s, Poetry Northwest, and Latino Poetry: A New Anthology. Book reviews have appeared at Booklist, Harriet, Letras Latinas Blog 2, and The Boston Globe. Essays and other non-fiction have been published in The Georgia Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Diego lives in Chicago and teaches poetry, English composition, and first-year seminars at the City Colleges, where he is an Assistant Professor of Multidisciplinary Studies.