Les Portes by Meredith Nnoka
Featured Book
Les Portes
Winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Cameron Awkward-Rich, and named a "Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026" by Ms. Magazine, Les Portes traces how harm against women and femmes takes root, recurs, and reshapes itself across generations. Unfolding in three movements--Le D but, Le Pass , and Le Pr sent--all of which rupture conventional domestic abuse narratives, and drawing heavily from zuihitsu, ekphrasis, erasure, and found forms to mirror the fractured experience of living through and after harm, these poems serve as radical meditations on the power to reflect as resistance. A queer woman caught in an abusive marriage begins to reimagine justice not as punishment but as something restorative, collective, and deeply non-carceral. In her debut book, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: "Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?" Rather than gesture toward resolution, Les Portes dwells inside this question, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Please join us to celebrate the poetry collection Les Portes by Meredith Nnoka, with Ashley Keyser and Crissonna Tennison.
Featured Authors
Meredith Nnoka
Meredith Nnoka is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. They are the author of Les Portes, winner of the 2025 CAAPP Book Prize, and the chapbooks I Could Never Be Your Woman and A Hunger Called Music. A member of the FireHorse Collective, Meredith teaches poetry in carceral facilities and has received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, their poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Four Way Review, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
Ashley Keyser
Ashley Keyser lives in Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, AGNI, The Adroit Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a poetry collection about colors and queer desire
In Conversation With
Crissonna Tennison
Crissonna Tennison is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist and cat lady-about-town. A nonprofit communications professional, she holds a BA in English Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Tennison is an active member of her local creative community; she hosts a queer fiber arts salon, performs as a drag king at various local venues, and is involved in multiple collaborative art projects at any given time. She is currently working on a series of paintings that explore geometric abstraction through a contemporary lens, as well as a personal essay collection about parental estrangement and self-actualization.
About the Venue
Women & Children First
Women & Children First believes in the transformative power of literature. As intersectional trans-inclusive feminists, we believe books are tools for liberation. Since 1979, we have celebrated and amplified underrepresented voices.
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