Just Love: A Dinner Salon with Jazz & Poetry inspired by James Baldwin
Date and Time
Feb 14, 2025 5:30 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Feb 14, 2025 5:30 pm
14th & V
The Cheuse Center and Busboys and Poets present:
Just Love: A Dinner Salon with Jazz & Poetry inspired by James Baldwin
To celebrate the Baldwin100 collaborative project
Featuring jazz musician Lena Seikaly singing Baldwin’s favorite jazz numbers
Poetry by E Ethelbert Miller, Zeina Azzam and Martheaus Perkins
The night will open with Martheaus Perkins, who will read his poem dedicated to Baldwin. Then we will have Zeina Azzam and E. Ethelbert Miller perform poems, and chat about love, Baldwin, and their own creativity. The evening’s headliner is Lena Seikaly and her quartet.
Venue: Busboys and Poets, 14th and V
Time: 5:30pm; doors open at 5pm. Program will end at 8:30pm.
Program: 5:30pm: Poetry; 6:30pm: Jazz
Lena Seikaly
A fixture on the D.C. jazz scene for over 15 years, vocalist and DC area-native Lena Seikaly is already making her mark in national and international jazz circles as a revivalist of traditional jazz vocals, as well as an innovator in contemporary vocal jazz styles. She was one of eleven semi-finalists for the prestigious 2015 Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Vocals Competition in L.A., is an alum of the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program in DC, the Jazz Aspen Snowmass program directed by Christian McBride, and the Strathmore Artist-in-Residence program in Maryland.
A proud Palestinian American, Lena has also been involved in many Arabic fusion projects both in the U.S. and abroad — in summer of 2015, she toured in Palestine (West Bank) and Israel as the featured vocalist with Al-Manara, a European-Palestinian ensemble performing original music based on the life of its Palestinian composer and founder, Ramzi Aburedwan.
The poets:
Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. She was selected as the Poet Laureate of the City of Alexandria, Virginia, in April 2022 and serves in this position for three years, from 2022 to 2025. Her full-length poetry collection, Some Things Never Leave You, was published in July 2023 by Tiger Bark Press. Zeina's chapbook, Bayna Bayna, In-Between, was published in 2021 by The Poetry Box, which nominated one of her poems ("Traveling with the Speed of Light") for the Pushcart Prize. In November 2022, The KNOT Magazine also nominated Zeina's poem, "Death in War," for a Pushcart.
Zeina's poetry appears in a number of literary journals including Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Plume, ONE ART, Vox Populi, Rusted Radishes, Mizna, Sukoon, Passager, Gyroscope, Barzakh, Pensive Journal, Split This Rock, Streetlight Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Voice Male. In addition, Zeina’s poems are published in anthologies and edited volumes such as Bettering American Poetry, Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees, The Black River: Death Poems, Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis, Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean, Tales from Six Feet Apart, and Gaza Unsilenced. Her poem, “You Birth the Seeds,” was set as a choral piece by renowned composer Melissa Dunphy.
In addition to participating regularly in poetry readings locally and nationally, Zeina serves as a mentor for We Are Not Numbers, a writing program for youth in Gaza, and volunteers for humanitarian organizations that support Palestinian development. She is also active in Grassroots Alexandria, a local group that advocates for the civil rights of vulnerable communities in Alexandria, Virginia, where she lives. Her educational background includes an M.A. in Arabic literature from Georgetown University, an M.A. in sociology from George Mason University, and a B.A. in psychology from Vassar College.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He has been a a supportive force on the Baldwin100 with the Cheuse Center. He is the author of two memoirs and several books of poetry including The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, a comprehensive collection that represents over 40 years of his work. For 17 years Miller served as the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine published in the United States. His poetry has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Miller is a two-time Fulbright Senior Specialist Program Fellow to Israel. He holds an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Emory and Henry College and has taught at several universities.
Miller is host of the weekly WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and host and producer of The Scholars on UDC-TV. In recent years, Miller has been inducted into the 2015 Washington DC Hall of Fame and awarded the 2016 AWP George Garret Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and the 2016 DC Mayor's Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. In 2018, he was inducted into Gamma Xi Phi and appointed as an ambassador for the Authors Guild. He was awarded a 2020 grant by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Miller’s most recent book If God Invented Baseball, published by City Point Press, was awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Martheaus Perkins is the author of "The Grace of Black Mothers," set to be released in July 2025 through Trio House Press. He is an M.F.A. candidate at Mason and originally from Texas. He and his work can be found at martheausperkins.com
The Baldwin100 is a collaborative arts, scholarship and cultural project encompassing a year-long series of initiatives designed to convene a wider Washington area audience to engage deeply with James Baldwin’s work. By celebrating Why Baldwin Matters, the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center is in a unique position to highlight a global Baldwin, whose impact on American intellectual and cultural life holds promise for a just world. The final outcomes of the initiative are: connecting the individual to their role to progress America towards a more just society. The Baldwin100 has a dozen host organizations, including Busboys and Poets. This is the second jazz program supported by the Baldwin100. The first was Strathmore's evening with Meshell Ndegeocello.
The Cheuse Center is a global community of writers, translators, and readers. We send emerging writers abroad, bring established and new voices to America, and curate public programs to deepen global civic engagement. We are a home for international writers and for American writers who face out into the world. By enriching public life through reading, writing, and translation, we actively pursue a just society.
