Chapter & Verse Literary Reading

Dr. Bill Banfield serves as Professor of Africana Studies/Music and Society, director of the Center for Africana Studies/Liberal Arts and teaches in the department. of composition and the graduate school, Berklee College of Music. In 2002, he served as a W.E.B. Dubois fellow at Harvard University and was appointed by Toni Morrison to serve as the visiting Atelier Professor, Princeton University, 2003. Banfield was appointed  in 2019 as a research associate with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Having served twice as a Pulitzer Prize judge in American music, Banfield is an award winning composer whose symphonies, operas, chamber works have been performed and recorded by major symphonies across the country. He also writes nonfiction about music and culture and has published a novel, Cedric’s Truth.

Jim LaFond-Lewis—poet, photographer, generalist—was born seventh in a family of nine siblings where he learned to negotiate a wide variety of personalities and relationships. Although an English major, he spent the first 30 years of his working life as a restaurateur and subsequently, after a brief foray into journalism, settled into the candy manufacturing business. He has written short stories, a screenplay and volumes of poetry. The Year There Were No Apples is his first published volume. Over the last 20 years, he has also developed an abiding passion for photography.

Clara Eugenia Ronderos is a Colombian American writer. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from University of Massachusetts/Amherst. Her publications include The Poetry of Clara Eugenia Ronderos: Seasons of Exile, a translation by Mary. G. Berg and the author of her prize-winning collection Estaciones en Exilio (2010). Other recent publications are Ábrete Sésamo, Madrid: 2016 (short stories), De Reyes y Fuegos and Después de la Fábula, Madrid: 2018 (poetry) and Agua que no has de beber, Argentina: 2019 (short stories). Currently she is a Professor of Spanish and Literature at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass.

Suggested donation: $5.00 or whatever you can afford. (We mean this. We would rather have you than your money.) Free refreshments are served.