Spend the evening in the double parlors with writer and actor, David Mills who will read from his recent poetry collections about slavery in colonial era New York. Mills, a 2025-2026 New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow will draw from his three most recent publications: Unhired Hands, Boneyarn, and How the Earth Answers.

About

Poet, actor, and native New Yorker, David Mills recent works include The Sudden Country, The Dream Detective, and Boneyarn, a book of poems about New York’s African Burial Ground, the oldest and largest slave cemetery in the country. Boneyarn won the North American Poetry Book Award and was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Review Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, the Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Poetry Daily, and Fence. He has received the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize and the Langston Hughes Society Award, as well as grants, fellowships, and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Bread Loaf, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Lannan Foundation. He wrote the audio script for Deborah Willis’s curated exhibition Reflections in Black: 100 Years of Black Photography, which was shown at the Whitney Museum. At the Cullman Center, Mills focused his work on a collection of poetry about the under-told story of Bronx slavery.

Cost: free

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