Join us at Urban Hang Suite for a double feature! We'll screen "The Interrupters", a documentary film by Alex Kotlowitz, at 5 pm followed by our regularly scheduled book club discussion of "Don't Call Us Dead", poems by Danez Smith, at 7.

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

*Meetings take place at Urban Hang Suite, 304 E Broad St, Richmond, VA 23219