Chris Randall Photo
Washington: Assuming Lit Happy Hour reins.
When Hanifa Washington stepped to the front of 101 Threads to deliver her poem “Beneath the Sea,” still inky on paper and new on her tongue, she didn’t have any idea what Literary Happy Hour was, or exactly what she was getting herself into.
The June 10 event was Juneteenth-themed: she knew only that she was going to try hard to do it justice.
“The corridor was about 50 feet,” she began.
Honeycomb, light, just two feet above head./
The body suit I was wearing made my heart heavy.
Eyes followed her as she began to walk the length of the room, reciting as she moved. One foot touched the floor, heel-toe, then the other. Running the event, Literary Happy Hour Curator Ifeanyi Awachie watched, transfixed.
“One step. Two. Another,” Washington read. “With each step my breath grew with panic.”
Precious Musa Photo
The crowd and Washington at the summer’s first July Lit Happy Hour.
Washington crossed the room again. The audience stuck with it. But even in the tense moment, Awachie felt a sudden sense of calm. She was seeing someone who, with every fiber of her being, was embracing the space she had built with almost no money.
And she saw a glimmer of something else, someone who was hungry to create more poetry in New Haven, and to keep the lyrical conversation going.
Awachie was onto something. A month after Washington performed at one of the summer’s Literary Happy Hour salons, she offered to take over the event as Awachie prepared to leave New Haven for graduate school at SOAS, an arm of the University of London. And Awachie, thrilled, accepted. For months she had been voluntarily running the series, in which area poets perform and take part in a talk back, and didn’t know if it would live on after her departure.
“Originally I didn’t know if it was going to continue,” she said in an interview with the Independent earlier this month. “I was doing this very intensive work for free, and was worried that it would have to end it at end of the summer.”
Precious Musa Photo
Washington, communications director for CEIO, program coordinator at The Word, and an unpaid worker bee with Westville’s monthly Permission to Fail events, wasn’t planning on taking on another job, much less one without funding. But, she said, the position was in her blood. It felt instinctive, bridging her backgrounds in community organizing and arts outreach.
“Ever since I was young and my mom was a community organizer, I’ve always enjoyed people coming together,” she said in an interview with the Independent. “That feeling of people coming together — always with music, always with dancing. Mixing organizing and fun and art is who I am.”
It was more than that. While performing at her first Literary Happy Hour — which doubled as her first interaction with the series — she had observed a singular space that was made for creative people of color, by creative people of color. There hadn’t been something quite like that in New Haven before, at least not for her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of it shriveling up.
“It was just one of those things where I looked at her [Awachie], my spirit sort of jumped, and I said: ‘Let’s talk,’” Washington recalled of her initial offer, made after Awachie’s declaration that the series might just end at the end of the summer. “To me it was clear … so many things were moving in a synergistic way that it just made sense.”
“I see Lit Happy Hour as something that is not replicating the system,” she added. “It’s welcoming people into a new way of being together. I see it as a pioneering tool, saying: ‘Here: This is how it can look.’ The literary arts, being together — this is how it can look. This is important — applauding and celebrating writers and artists of color. We’re saying: O.K., we’re going to go this ourselves.
“It’s like church in a way. There’s a feeling of communion. It’s not just an open mic. This is people sharing their spirit and their soul, and a chance to have deeper conversations…. We need to create more spaces like that in New Haven.”
Chris Randall Photo
Awachie and Washington announce the passing of the baton.
That means that the series, which Washington describes as a life-transforming and wholly empowering experience for her as a performer, will also undergo some changes, expanding with many of the ideas up her verse-filled sleeve. Like letting youth curate and lead a few of the sessions each year. Or being bi-monthly instead of monthly. Or moving the evenings around New Haven a lot more, to increase the number of people performing and listening to poetry in neighborhoods and community spaces once unfamiliar to them.
But the bones of it, Washington says, will stay largely the same, and retain the same spirit.
“Literary Happy Hour provides a new way of community connection that we’re all hungry for,” she said. “This is a new venue where we’re keenly listened to and heard, sharpened, pushed … all around a very holistic experience. There’s not a beat that goes by where you feel like someone is talking at you. When you’re talking about places and spaces that are creating spaces for being … spaces that have the value of power with, not power over or power under. We’re doing this all together. The questions are jewels, gifts. The role of the curator holding that space … it’s really tremendous for me in this divinely creative way.”
Awachie feels pretty good about the transition too. Her only regret?
“I’m really excited about what the events in the fall will be,” she said. “I just wish I could see the first one.”
To listen to a pendant piece from WNHH radio, click on or download the audio above.