The College of the Florida Keys (CFK) invites the community to attend its CFK Poetics event on April 18 at 5 p.m. at the Tennessee Willliams Theatre on the Key West Campus. The annual visiting poets activity will feature a live reading from acclaimed poet Lauren K. Alleyne. She will read some of her work and take questions from the audience. The event is free for all attendees.

Alleyne serves as Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and as a professor of English. She is author of two collections Honeyfish (2019), Difficult Fruit (2014), two chapbooks Dawn in the Kaatskills and (Un)Becoming Gretel, and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies internationally, including venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Ms., among several others. Alleyne, who hails from the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, has been recognized with a US Artist Award nomination (2023), an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry (2020), the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press (2017) and has been shortlisted for the BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature and the Library of Virginia prize for poetry (2020). In 2022, Alleyne was awarded an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virgina, and the JMU Agency Star Award.

CFK Poetics is a series that aims to develop awareness of an immersion in the humanities landscape by connecting students and the community with poetry on the national level in a way that is immediate to their own experiences. Since 2019, visiting poets have come to Key West or appeared virtually to share their work and have conversations with the student body as well as the community at large. Formerly featured poets include B.H. Fairchild, Chelsea Rathburn, Richard Blanco, and Ross Gay, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and Adrian Matejka. Additional information about CFK Poetics can be found on the College’s website at cfk.edu/poetics.