Open Mic Night – Featuring Jennifer Bartell Boykin, Author of Only Believe

The Pat Conroy Literary Center’s monthly Open Mic Night will be held at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St.) on Thursday, October 10, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Our featured writer is Columbia City Poet Laureate Jennifer Bartell Boykin, author of Only Believe, selected for the 2023 Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Open Mic will also feature short readings of 3 to 5 minutes each by other writers in many genres.

Interested in reading as part of Open Mic? Let us know at contact@patconroyliterarycenter.org.

About Our Featured Writer
Poet Laureate of Columbia, South Carolina, and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, Jennifer Bartell Boykin is the author of the poetry collections Traveling Mercy and Only Believe. Her poetry has also appeared in Obsidian, Callaloo, the Raleigh Review, kinfolks: a journal of black expression, the museum of americana: a literary review, and Scalawag.

Bartell Boykin is the recipient of fellowships from Callaloo and The Watering Hole. A school librarian at Muller Road Middle School in Blythewood, SC, she previously taught creative writing and English at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, SC, where she was also named the 2019–20 Teacher of the Year. She has been recognized as an American Library Association Spectrum Scholar and an Augusta Baker Scholar at the University of South Carolina’s School of Information Science, where she earned her master of library and information science degree. Bartell Boykin was born and raised in Bluefield, a Black community in Johnsonville, South Carolina.

“Bartell’s Only Believe carefully treads through remembering childhood assault confounded with good memories that some would struggle to keep, including memories that elders lose if we’re not quick enough to catch them. These poems are part oral history and part affirmation, but this collection complicates faith and walks readers closer to truth, healing, and forgiveness and standing tall in a grandmother’s house.”–Tara Betts, author of Refuse to Disappear and Break the Habit

“There are two stories in Only Believe–the story of a girl who doesn’t know how or when to tell what happened to her, and the story of her grandma, whose house is a place of both refuge and danger, whose decline into Alzheimer’s is a counterpoint to the speaker’s own struggles with memory. Memory, as Jennifer Bartell reminds us, is neither window nor mirror nor veil, but all at the same time. Religion promises answers—’My Black Jesus can do anything’–but tricks her into blame and shame instead. Something happened to that girl and she knows that ‘it’s time to speak / it’s time to heal.’ The only way to do that is by telling both stories, that of the girl struggling to speak, and that of the grandmother, whose life reminds her that ‘God is a woman / on a big black Singer / sewing machine, whose quilts became her tablets, whose needle becomes her pen.’–Ed Madden, author of A Pooka in Arkansas and Ark