📖✨ Brother to Brother: A Monthly Book Club for Black Gay Men ✨📖
🌟 What We’re About:
A safe, empowering space for Black gay men to connect, read, and grow together.
📅 Once a Month on Zoom
🧘🏿♂️ Every session begins with a guided meditation inspired by themes from our reading.
📚 What We Read:
One short article, essay, or story AND
One longer novel or nonfiction book monthly.
All selections center on the lives, voices, and experiences of Black gay men.
🌱 What You’ll Gain:
A supportive, judgment-free space.
Deeper connection to yourself and others.
Insightful conversations and personal growth.
May 2025- Bluff by Danez Smith
Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem―part map, part annotation, part visual argument―offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.
Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love―those given and made―are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.
Danez Smith: On His New Poetry Collection, Writing About Gay Sex, and the Power of Blackness
Your Facilitator:
Jeffrey Charles Fleming, is an actor, educator, and published author. As a proud Alumnus of Howard University and a native of Richmond, VA, and a million other life experiences along the way, he is proud to add this experience of reading books with members of his community. As a current resident in the Nation’s Capital, he enjoys singing with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, working out in the gym, spending time with family and friends and his babies at home: Treasure (turtle), Jesse, Jamal and Josiah (plants.) He thanks all of his family and friends for their love and support. Follow him on Instagram: @Sonofhoward
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