Join us for an evening with Chet’la Sebree, who will read from her new essay collection, Turn (W)here: A Geography of Home. A conversation with Niya Bates will follow. This in-person event will be cosponsored by WriterHouse and will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: At eighteen, Chet’la Sebree began, as she writes, “perfecting the art of leaving.” After moving out of her parents’ house in Delaware for college, the lauded poet, essayist, and academic rarely kept the same address for more than two years—bouncing from city to city, country to country, perpetually in search of her next adventure.
For Sebree, traveling has been a life-long passion, forged during family road trips and vacations with friends; college study abroad programs in Europe; and far-flung writing residencies and job opportunities. She dreamed of one day taking her own Great American Road Trip, Jack Kerouac–style—except refashioned as a millennial Black woman who had also begun considering her next chapter: settling down and starting a solo fertility journey.
During the pandemic, Sebree thought she might finally get her chance to hit the road. But then, George Floyd was murdered, following the killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Aubrey, and so many others. As America continued to reveal its most violent self, Sebree started to wrestle with the very idea of home: Where do I belong in a country not meant for people like me to survive? What does this mean for a child I might bring into it?
In Turn (W)here, Sebree turns to the page for answers, seamlessly weaving memoir with history and cultural criticism in a collection of inventive essays bound by themes of movement, home, inheritance, and belonging. Spanning continents, geographies, and states of mind, Sebree lights a pathway for the wanderer, the seeker—anyone propelled into the unknown by the desire for a place to truly belong.
About the Author: Chet’la Sebree is the author of Turn (W)here: A Geography of Home, as well the poetry collections Blue Opening, longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry; Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Mistress, nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Sebree has received fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Yaddo, among others. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Guernica, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review, among other journals. She’s currently an assistant professor at The George Washington University and serves as a faculty mentor in Randolph College’s MFA in Creative Writing program.
About the Moderator: Niya Bates (she/her) is a PhD candidate in history and African American studies at Princeton University. She studies nineteenth and twentieth century US history, global environmentalism, and rural cultural landscapes. Her dissertation seeks to connect rural Black cultural landscapes in nineteenth century Appalachia to global traditions of marronage. Bates also serves as senior manager of preservation practice with the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She is a contributing author of Declaration House, forthcoming from Monument Lab and Temple University Press. Niya was born and raised in central Virginia and descends from families who were enslaved in that area.
