'In those rooms': Torch Literary Arts highlights and celebrates Black women writers

Arts Eclectic turns the spotlight on happenings in the arts and culture scene in and around the Austin area. Through interviews with local musicians, dancers, singers, and artists, Arts Eclectic aims to bring locals to the forefront and highlight community cultural events.Support for Arts Eclectic comes from Broadway Bank and Rock n Roll Rentals.

Amanda Johnston is Texas’ 2024 Poet Laureate, and the first Black woman to hold that title. Long before earning that honor, she created Torch Literary Arts as a passion project 18 years ago. “As a Black woman writer,” she says, “I was realizing that most of my opportunities and invitations were coming from not just outside of Austin, but outside of the state.

Reconfiguring as a nonprofit allowed Torch Literary Arts to do some fundraising, hire some staff, and continue with their mission.Fridays there's a new feature,” she says. “And we publish Black women's writing across poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and scripts, so plays and screenplays.” Monthly, they publish a larger feature with a more established writer, including some of their original work and an interview.makes it a policy to pay their contributors, Johnston says.

Though her literary work keeps Johnston busy, she also makes time to pursue some other artistic endeavors – she has a showing of her mixed media work calledat the Museum of Human Achievement this month. The work in that show begain during the lockdown period of the pandemic. “As a poet, you know, images come to me and then they come out as writing, right? They come out as poems,” she says.

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