Mark your calendar, grab your friends, and head to Sonny's Pizza on November 19th at 7:00 pm for our reading featuring Chet'la Sebree reading alongside nine local writers in fiction, nonficiton, and poetry including our Author's Corner Spotlights Tamar Shapiro and Charlotte Taylor Fryar!
Whether you're a bookworm, an inspiring writer, or just enjoy listening to stories, The Inner Loop readings have something for everyone. Our mission is to create an inclusive writing community in DC, so we encourage you to grab some food, a drink, and meet other literature lovers. We can't wait to see you there!
Learn more about our featured reader:
Chet'la Sebree (pronounced: SHAY-la) is the author of Blue Opening, forthcoming from Tin House in September 2025. She is also the author of Field Study (FSG Originals, June 2021), winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry (2020). Her debut essay collection about her relationship to home, heritage, and belonging through domestic and international travel is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2026.
Raised in the Mid-Atlantic, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing, with a focus in poetry, from American University. For her work, Chet’la has received fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts, the DC Commission for the Arts & Humanities, the Delaware Division of the Arts, the Hawthornden Foundation, Hedgebrook, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, MacDowell, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Stadler Center for Poetry, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Chet’la’s poetry and prose have appeared in Guernica, Lit Hub, The New Republic, Pleiades, Poetry International, The Yale Review. Among her other publications, her essays and poems have been anthologized in Dr. Ibram X. Kendi & Dr. Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, Kwame Alexander’s This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, and Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories That Changed the World.
In addition to her individual practice, she has collaborated with several artists including photographer Shannon Woodloe, with whom she developed a poetry and photography exhibition in conversation with Mistress called 405.
Currently, Chet’la is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program at Randolph College.
Learn more about our Author's Corner Spotlights:
Tamar Shapiro was raised in both the U.S. and Germany and now lives in Washington, DC with her husband, two children, and the world’s best dog. While writing her first novel, Restitution, Shapiro attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Program and the Bread Load Writers’ Conference in Vermont, as well as year-long novel workshops at StoryStudio Chicago and the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. A former housing attorney and non-profit leader, she is a 2026 MFA candidate at Randolph College in Virginia.
Charlotte Taylor Fryar is a writer, historian, educator, and herbalist. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in Glen Echo, Maryland, less than seven hundred feet from the banks of the Potomac River. Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation’s River (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in March 2025) is her first book. You can find out more at her website: charlottetaylorfryar.com.
