Les Portes by Meredith Nnoka

Please join us to celebrate the poetry collection Les Portes by Meredith Nnoka, with Ashley Keyser and Crissonna Tennison.

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.

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 Verse History of Black Music. Meredith has a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, they teach poetry in carceral facilities and have received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. 

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.

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.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which has a wheelchair accessible entrance and bathroom. Masks are required. We have free masks available for everyone at the door, several large air purifiers, and ceiling fans for circulation. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you need a reserved seat, ASL interpretation, or have other access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com (2 weeks notice is required for interpretation).