MaKshya Tolbert — Shade is a place - with Lauren Russell

<p><a href="https://politics-prose.com/book/9780143138457?ic_referral=u0fsN1psF6mqZ8TrLnVLwibqzrEZ2JXl8nX60PCT49UwM5bpcHMqn8VIDWTgzS52B0ZcJPuSKr5c61zQMtVp_6Ewaq3iegAV4NoDXP992UzLO2v92EOuYjGuFBc42dpxoOYhyhY"><em><strong>Shade is a place</strong></em></a> meanders east-west along Charlottesville's Downtown Mall, seeking &quot;a Black sense of place&quot; at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall's architectural history, and the speaker's ongoing questions and reflections. The collection of poems is a moving invitation to open one's attention by looking up, down, and always within. Through lyric walking poems (&quot;tree walks&quot; and &quot;shade walks&quot;) and Bashō-style travelogue, <em><strong>Shade is a place</strong></em> unfolds as much through arboreal life as through one's inner life--sometimes alone, sometimes with others, and always among turning trees.</p><p><strong>MaKshya Tolbert</strong> practices poetry and placemaking in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. She is the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, and co-stewards Fernland Studios, an open-ended studio insistent on rest, rejuvenation, and reciprocity as a core compositional practice. Tolbert was the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship Guest Curator, and served as 2024-25 Chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission. She has received fellowship and residency support from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, New City Arts, Community of Writers, and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Her recent poetry and prose can be found at Poem-a-Day, <em>Emergence Magazine</em>, <em>West Branch</em>, <em>Poets for Science</em>, and <em>Ran Off With the Star Bassoon</em>. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Gastronomic Sciences. <em>Shade is a place</em> is her first book. In her free time, she is elsewhere--a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls &quot;that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.&quot;</p><p>Tolbert is in conversation with <strong>Lauren Russell</strong>, a poet and writer in hybrid forms. She is the author of <em>A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance</em> (Milkweed Editions, 2024); <em>Descent </em>(Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and <em>What’s Hanging on the Hush</em> (Ahsahta Press, 2017). An NEA and Cave Canem fellow, Russell has received residencies from Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ <em>Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine</em>, <em>Poetry,</em> and elsewhere. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.</p><p>https://politics-prose.com/book/9780143138457?ic_referral=Rh-A0n3GgfmwcEY3p9FsrsqTwLyDWcbbTOwPkenyRoYwM3MDOY3IasTu6BwKHqEU2RWH5zQtACFqEOScjQR6KDhYq5UdohH7E7c-Q8_F8lL7ekytcLjgtln8zLyrdK8btAjMILs</p>