Home on Our Back: A Laureate’s Reading on the Poetics of Diaspora, was a bi-city poetry collaboration between Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola and Philadelphia Poet Laureate Raquel Salas Rivera, which explored how migrations have shaped both cities. From North to South, from enslavement to freedom, across borders, from colony to the heart of the empire, migration, displacement and a shifting idea of home have been foundational to the formation of communities in major cities on the East Coast. These Poet Laureates invited six poets (three from each city) to write from and to their cities and these histories of migration. The poets performed in Boston and Philly and invited audiences to participate in the creation of new narratives built on solidarity and acknowledging the generative power of writing our own futures.
