BONK! To Host 7th Annual “Mary Finley and Marcie Eanes Memorial Black History Month Read-In”

On Thursday, February 24th at 6:30 pm, BONK! Arts and Culture Series will be hosting the 7th Annual “Mary Finley and Marcie Eanes Memorial Black History Month Read-In”. Working in collaboration with Find the Light LLC, and Racine Public Library, this event will be held virtually via Zoom webinar and streamed to Facebook Live. 

A Black History Month Read-In is an event where community members of all different backgrounds join together to celebrate the vibrant legacy of black contributions to world literature. Fifteen community members will be given 5 minutes each to read a piece (or an excerpt of a piece) of writing written by someone from the black diaspora.

Mary Finley and Marcie Eanes were two prominent black women residents of Racine who were inspirations both in the Racine community locally, as well as the literary community nationally–Mary as an ambassador and literary agent and Marcie as a writer herself and supporter of the arts. They have both gone on to join the elders, Mary in 2014 and Marcie in 2015. Shortly before Marcie passed away, she was chosen as one of the finalists for the Racine Poet Laureate position. We are honored to be able to celebrate these two women as leaders of both Racine’s Black Community, as well as Racine’s Literary Community.

Because the purpose of this event is to highlight the copious, diverse contributions of all black people to literature, and because we want to illustrate the great breadth of those contributions as much as possible in one and a half short hours, we will not be having ANY repeats of authors. This is a unique aspect of Racine’s BHM read-in and has been the practice since it was first founded in 2016.