David Mills: BONEYARN (with Aja Lans)

Bird in Hand is honored to host this public event with David Mills and Aja Lans, which is a collaboration between the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, the Krieger First-Year Seminars, and the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts. David Mills’ BONEYARN is a poetry collection like none other, turning Mills’ singular poetic eye to New York’s African Burial Ground, America’s oldest and largest cemetary for enslaved people. BONEYARN was the winner of the 2022 North American Book Award.

In the words of Alan Shapiro, “Mills combines a novelist’s love of character with a poet’s pitch perfect ear for idiom and eye for unforgettable detail” to create a book that “laments and affirms or finds in lamentation a complicated form of affirmation.”

It raises essential questions about the poetic imagination as a tool of historicization, and we are thrilled that Dr. Aja Lans of the Department of Anthropology and Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University will join Mills in conversation. We hope you can join us.

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David Mills holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA from New York University. He’s published four bestselling collections: The Sudden Country, The Dream Detective, After Mistic (Massachusetts slavery poems) and Boneyarn—the sole book of poems about slavery in New York City, winner of the North American Book Award and finalist for the Crab Orchard Series Open Competition Award, the Housatonic Book Award, and the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Rattapallax, Poetry Daily, Evergreen Review, and Fence—and he has been a Pushcart Prize finalist. He has also received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, The American Antiquarian Society, the Lannan Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Henry James and Holden Fellowships, the Schomburg Center, the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize. He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark Harlem home for three years (was a recipient of the Langston Hughes Society Award) and wrote the audio script for Macarthur-Genius-Award Winner Deborah Willis’ curated exhibition: Reflections in Black:100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney and Getty Museums. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He has recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records and has had his works displayed at the Venice Biennale.

Aja Lans is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research integrates Black feminisms and critical race theory into bioarchaeological investigations. A major area of focus is the objectification of human remains contained within universities and museum collections. She argues for the repatriation of Black Ancestors who are “owned” by such institutions. Outside of the academy, she consults on cultural resource management projects in New York City.