Abegunde is a Memory Keeper, ancestral priest in the Yoruba Orisa tradition, and a Reiki Master with a focus on the recovery and healing of ancestral memory from the Earth and human body. She chooses to forget that words and days have limits. Instead, she chooses to remember – and live by – the words of a young Black woman in the 5th grade: Poetry can change the world.  As a result, she spends her days and dreamtime chanting silenced memories into spoken histories. On the weekdays, when she isn’t birthing new words out of sound and images, she shapeshifts into a professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the founding director of The Graduate Mentoring Center at Indiana University. Her ongoing research and subsequent creations help us understand how unresolved ancestral emotions shape the lives of descendants of the Middle Passage and the links between ancestral wounding, contemporary violence, and illness and disease. She will read from ​her work-in-progress Learning to Eat the Dead: Juba, USA, ​a meditation on visiting Juba, South Sudan, living in the United States, and poetic transparency.

Brick Street South Poetry Series features a poet and an open mic the third Thursday of every month.  Free admission and parking. Beer and wine for purchase.