Janae Newsom & Landon Smith: A Mills Alum Reading

Presented by the Place for Writers through the Creative Writing and Literature program at Mills College. 

This event is free and open to the public.
Registration is requested. Masks are required indoors.

Join us as we hear from our Mills MFA Creative Writing and MA English Literature and Languages alums read from their most recent work.

Janae Newsom is a writer, Mama, poet, and educator from East Oakland California. Her work seeks to raise the voices of black women and girls. She received her MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, and in 2021 was named the Voyage YA book pitch contest winner. An excerpt from her novel, June Nova, is published on the Voyage YA website. Her written work can also be found in the Anthology Essential Truths: The Bay Area in color, and her think piece, These Bullets Have All of Our Names can be found on medium.

Landon Smith is a father, a professor, a poet, a painter, half Mende and half Balanta & Fulani, that feeling of falling that wakes you up in a dream, the Amethyst geode on your desk, Angela Davis' afro, Frantz Fanon's pocket notebook, Walter Rodney’s fingernail, the 7-10 bowling split, your favorite pillow. Despite his institutional degrees, he fully stepped into being a poet through the East Side Arts Alliance in Oakland. Landon thanks his older sister Alia for buying him his first journal, and Britt Hill for making him start to read poetry in public.