A poetry reading by Tawanda Mulalu backed by live jazz grooves from the D-CLAIM collective at The Wild Detectives.
Tawanda Mulalu reads at The Wild Detectives on Thursday, October 15, as part of the D-CLAIM series. It's a poetry reading backed by a live band, so you're getting a writer and a full group on the same stage rather than a poet reading into a microphone in a quiet room.
Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. His first book, Please make me pretty, I don't want to die (Princeton University Press, 2022), won the 2023 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry and was named one of the best collections of 2022 by The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He'll be reading his work with the band playing along behind him.
That band is D-CLAIM, a Dallas-based jazz and literature collective founded by poet and bassist J.D. Debris. The project pairs hip-hop tinged jazz with a poetry reading and runs as a monthly series on the third Thursday of every month, sponsored by Project Poetica at SMU English. For this night, the lineup is Ste'fon Landers on saxophone, Manny Galindo on piano, Nicholas Rothouse on percussion, Ian Yoo on drums, and J.D. Debris on bass. The Dallas Observer has praised D-CLAIM for giving jazz new material, and the band draws on Gil Scott-Heron, Esperanza Spalding, and East Coast boom-bap.
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The venue is The Wild Detectives, an independent bookstore bar in Oak Cliff that aims to encourage community-driven cultural conversation. The reading starts at 7 PM at 314 W 8th St.
