On May 4, 2025, the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston hosted a poetry reading to honor the passing of Boston’s second poet laureate: Haitian-born, Boston-based poet, writer, editor, translator, and academic, Danielle Legros Georges. Poems published and workshopped throughout Legros Georges’s life were read by her friends in the white-walled auditorium. The event drew poets, public officials from Boston and France, academics, and artistic collaborators, including the Haitian Artists Assembly of Massachusetts and the New England Poetry Club, among many others. One speaker, spoken word artist, singer, and frequent collaborator U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo, read from a poem that she dedicated to Legros Georges: “I loved your sass and sophistication, the way you knew just what I needed, a poetry godmother, a dreamweaver and catcher.”
Although an art museum seems like a curious venue to commemorate a poet, the location was a significant place to Legros Georges, who served on the Artists Advisory Council at the ICA, and in 2015 and 2016, curated a set of poetic events held alongside an exhibition about the Black Mountain College.
Left to right: Trasi Johnson, Danielle Legros Georges, and Janice Lowe, outside of the Dark Room’s meeting place, Cambridge, MA, 1989. Photo courtesy of Thomas Sayers Elllis.
But Legros Georges’s relationship with the ICA began decades prior through her involvement with the Dark Room Collective (DRC), a formative group of Black poets who shaped her early work as a writer. Founded in the wake of James Baldwin’s death in 1987, the Dark Room Collective began with an idea for a reading series that would fill a gap among the many luminary poets who spoke at venues across Boston and Cambridge by creating a platform for emerging and established Black poets. Between 1989 and 1998, the grassroots artistic community boasted thirty active members and even more contributing participants that celebrated and commemorated Black art in its many forms.1 It hosted musical performances, art exhibitions, and readings by prominent African American writers and artists at venues across Boston—ultimately launching a series of events and regular gatherings at the ICA / Boston. Legros Georges joined the collective during its first year shortly after she graduated from Emerson College, having learned of the group from writer Tisa Bryant. She’d later read her unpublished works alongside novelist Terry McMillan in her second year as a member.
During the memorial in May, Major Jackson read one of Legros Georges’s poems, highlighting the importance of selecting the ICA as the space to commemorate her. The institute has an overlooked history of “supporting literature.” He mused, “I am not sure if [the legacies of the Dark Room Collective] is known about this institution.”
Boston’s third poet laureate, Porsha Olayiwola, gave remarks at the memorial reading event on May 4, 2025. Photo by Ally Schmaling.
Kenny Mascary, interim chief of arts and culture for the City of Boston, spoke about how Legros Georges was committed to making poetry more accessible to all. Photo by Ally Schmaling.
Danielle Legros Georges was a professor emerita and former MFA director at Lesley University as well as an instructor at the William Joiner Institute at UMass Boston. She authored several translations and chapbooks, including The Dear Remote Nearness of You (2016), which won the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, and Letters from Congo (2017). Her final book, Three Leaves, Three Roots (2025), published a month before her death, poetically reinterprets the period between 1960 and 1975 when Haitian educators migrated to the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo. The book embraces the interconnectedness of African diasporic histories, reminding us in the introduction that Boston has the third largest population of Haitian immigrants in the United States.
In 2015, Legros Georges was appointed Boston’s poet laureate, during which time she worked to integrate poetry into the everyday lives of Bostonians. She founded Raining Poetry and held poetry workshops for seniors living in Jamaica Plain, holding steadfast to her belief that poetry belonged to everyone. As she told WBUR in 2016, “Poetry lives on pages, but it also lives in our ears and in the world.”2 She frequently collaborated with museums and civic institutions, joining the board of the ICA to advocate for accessible art while reflecting the experiences of Black diasporic life. She also collaborated with Bryant, Sam Durant, Robin Coste Lewis, and Kevin Young (two of whom she met through the DRC) on the site-specific installation The Meeting House (2016), which commemorates the personal and political lives of Concord’s first emancipated African residents.
Flyer for a Dark Room Collective Reading Series event in 1993 at the ICA / Boston.
Flyer for a Dark Room Collective Reading Series event in 1993 at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.
The Dark Room Collective was conceived in 1987, when Thomas Sayers Ellis, Sharan Strange, and their housemates made the trip from Cambridge to New York to attend James Baldwin’s funeral, which featured tributes from Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and William Styron. The moment was remarkable in many distinct senses—the speakers held varying opinions from Baldwin about the role of the African American literary form (Baraka, in particular, was often in conflict with Baldwin). “Amid the somberness of that occasion sat the stark realization that he was truly lost to us,” writes Strange in a 2013 essay, continuing, “Our sorrow was suffused with a kind of energy, a desire to make something positive out of loss, and so we resolved that we wouldn’t let another of our literary elders get away from us.”3 This marked a significant turning point where the memorial became not only a funeral, but also a space to commemorate the manifold forms that literature was taking at the turn of 1990.
Returning to their shared home in Central Square, Strange and Sayers Ellis began conceiving of a cultural community that celebrated and supported living Black writers and their literary ancestors. Together with Janice Lowe, they began planning programming for the following spring. Although there were many Black writers living and teaching in Boston, there was a remarkable lack of events or public readings that spotlighted African American and Black diasporic writing. “Local emerging writers seemed to go unnoticed by the curators … at the public libraries and university English and writing departments,” noted Strange in her 2013 essay. Sayers Ellis, who was working for Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge at the time, recalled that there were very few books by Black people available for purchase.
Writer and AGNI editor Askold Melnyczuk recalled in an essay that “little typed notices began appearing on bulletin boards announcing readings,” xeroxed and often on paper with neon colors, throughout Cambridge and Boston.4 Instead of advertising in libraries, universities, or spaces sanctioned as “cultural,” Strange revealed that the collective “publicized our series in barbershops in Roxbury … and gave out handmade flyers on the street and at parties or posted them in record shops.”
The Dark Room Collective met in the communal house that Strange and Sayers Ellis shared with four other artists and activists at 31 Inman Street in Cambridge. Collective meetings were held biweekly and encouraged members to share and workshop their writing with each other. A public reading series was held the other Sundays and paired budding writers with more prominent ones. In the same Mosaic essay, Strange writes, “the reading series and our workshops were in a sense our true MFA writing program.”5 Trekking between Boston, Providence, Amherst, and Waltham, Lowe, Sayers Ellis, and Strange assembled an incredible group of headliners for the first two years. Reading in the group’s living room were greats such as Samuel Delany, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ntozake Shange, Derek Walcott, and Alice Walker. Although they could not offer an honorarium, according to a Harvard Magazine profile, DRC members “pooled their resources to pay for their guests’ tickets to Boston, for gas money to drive them to the train station and airport—for a dinner out if possible, but a home-cooked meal if not.”6
Members of the Dark Room Collective, photographed by Cambridge photographer Elsa Dorfman in 2013. From left to right: Sharan Strange, Janice Lowe, Danielle Legros Georges, John Keene, Tisa Bryant, Major Jackson, Artress Bethany White, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Patrick Sylvain, and Tracy K. Smith. Photo courtesy of Harvard Magazine.
While Strange and Sayers Ellis were hosting readings in the living room, they were also simultaneously collecting books in a former darkroom on the third floor—another form of caring for their literary ancestors. (They amassed the entire Heinemann African Writers Series, a collection that comprised over 300 books,7 among many other titles, as well as boxes of books contributed by Gloria Joseph and Audre Lorde.) “Dark Room” was stenciled in black adhesive letters on the door, and Strange and Sayers Ellis liked the pun of storing “Black books” in an unused darkroom. The metaphor of a darkroom stuck, both for the name of the collection and the collective. Sharan Strange described the darkroom and the Dark Room Collective as “a place where images develop, brought forth in darkness into light. Incubator. Womb.”8 Like the magical chemistry of film within the darkroom, the collective similarly gave participants time and space to develop.
Given its namesake, it is perhaps no coincidence that many of the collective’s members were, or later became, photographers. Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002) poetically reimagines photographs shown at the Museum of Modern Art of light-skinned Black women sex workers in the early twentieth century, while in 2016, Legro Georges collaborated with photographer Jennifer Waddell on a poetry and photography project depicting Mattapan residents. The early seasons of the Dark Room Reading Series featured exhibitions by local visual artists Vusumuzi Maduna, Ifé Franklin, Bryan McFarlane, Roxanne Perinchief, and Kirstin Gabler, among others, curated by the collective’s cofounder Janice Lowe and emerging painter Ellen Gallagher.
In the poem “T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M.,” Sayers Ellis wrote “Baldwin died / and we became a church.” And indeed, the DRC became a sort of cathedral for writers, readers, and listeners who believed in a poetry of mutuality. The collective attracted listeners who were mostly Black folks living in Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and Cambridge. People who attended were not only established and aspiring artists, but also community members and neighbors who ranged in ages, identities, and aspirations. While expansive in audience demographic, those who attended shared at least one central trait: radical engagement in celebrating African American and Black diasporic art.
When the landlord of 31 Inman Street announced plans to sell their home, the grassroots collaborative moved to the ICA’s then-temporary location on Tremont Street. The move, supported by a grant from the Lannan Foundation as well as Florence Ladd of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, was generative, surprising, and met with ambivalence. “We had given up the cozy confines of mom and pop grassroots for Art Agenda Glitz overnight,” reflected Sayers Ellis in an email, continuing, “The ICA seemed to pull me, a few of us, deeper into the world of art funding and umbrella organizations … something that I was not at all interested in.”
Yet the Dark Room reading series continued drawing standing-room-only crowds in the ICA auditorium. “To passersby or museum patrons who happened to wander downstairs, it was likely a novel sight,” Strange muses in our correspondence, “Having that many people of color gathered there, plus having an independent Black artists’ collective doing programming twice a month, was, at that point, probably unprecedented for the ICA.” Tisa Bryant similarly recalled that “readings series like ours are common at arts venues now, but I don’t know if our partnership with the ICA augured in something new for the times. I would say that being at the ICA certainly elevated and expanded the DRC profile, and made the ICA resonate in a different way for folks who never went there before.”
The Dark Room Collective’s short history at the ICA bears significant resemblance to the May 4 celebration of Legros Georges, which honored the rich and manifold legacies of Black life and creativity that Legros Georges sought to give voice to. As we reflect on Legros Georges’s life and work, it becomes clear that both she and the DRC cultivated spaces where the many expressions of Black life could be celebrated, cared for, and remembered. Indeed, it makes one wonder what future might be birthed from the commemoration.
And yet, the legacy of the Dark Room Collective remains largely undocumented and under researched—with no markers indicating their Central Square origins or sustained exhibitions on the collective’s relationship to the ICA, let alone to Greater Boston. There is a need to both pay tribute to and document the lives of the collective’s members. One cannot help but think of the metaphor of the darkroom—the collective’s namesake. In the darkroom, a photograph is alchemized from light into image. The memorial is suggestive of the nascent possibilities of the collective being remembered, of waiting to be fully developed, of being brought into the metaphorical light and given the collective interpretation it deserves.
1 Sharan Strange, “Total Life Is What We Want’: A Brief History of the Dark Room Collective.,” Mosaic, May 12, 2013, https://mosaicmagazine.org/dark-room-collective-essay/.
2 Phaedra Scott, “Haiti to Boston: Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges on ‘The Dear Remote Nearness of You,’” WBUR, May 13, 2016, https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/05/13/danielle-legros-georges-bp.
3 Strange, “Dark Room Collective: Essay”
4 Askold Melnyczuk, “A Costly Telegram to the Dark Room Collective,” Callaloo, 1993, Vol 16, No, 3, p. 513–514.
5 Strange, “Dark Room Collective: Essay”
6 Sophia Nguyen “Elbow Room,” Harvard Magazine, February 29, 2024, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/02/elbow-room.
7 The Heinemann collection is perhaps most renowned for publishing Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart.
8 Strange, “Dark Room Collective: Essay”
A full recording of Danielle Legros Georges’s memorial reading event can be viewed on the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s YouTube channel.
