Please join us in celebrating Black History month with a panel featuring the following authors, moderated by Michael King.

Tony Keith Jr., PhD is an award-winning Black American gay poet, spoken word artist, and Hip-Hop educational leader from Washington DC. Or, you can just call him an “Ed Emcee”. He is the author of How the Boogeyman Became a Poet and Knucklehead (February 2025), both published by HarperCollins. A multi-year fellow of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Tony has featured performances at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington National Cathedral, Historic Lincoln Theatre, Bus Boys & Poets, and in schools and communities around the world including South Africa, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago and many more. Currently, Tony serves as founder and CEO of Ed Emcee Academy, is on the board of Directors at Shout Mouse Press, and teaches English Language Arts for adult learners at Academy of Hope in his DC hometown, where he resides with his husband, Harry Christian III.

Shannon Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was named a Publishers Weekly and Debutiful Best Book of 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere, and received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Silver Spring with her husband and three sons.

Steve Majors is the author of High Yella: A Modern Family Memoir (University of Georgia Press) and the forthcoming essay collection Man Made: In Search of Dads, Daddies, Father Figures and Fatherhood (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). Steve’s writing explores issues of race, class, culture and identity and his personal essays have been published in national outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, CNN.com and NBC Think.  Steve’s writing skills were honed as a journalist. For many decades he worked as a TV producer, first in major TV markets across the country, and then in New York where he held successive leadership positions at CNBC, MSNBC and NBC’s Weekend TODAY show. Most recently, he’s led marketing and communications for national nonprofits. He is currently chief of external affairs at Teach For America.

Michael King is a host/news anchor at WAMU-FM. Michael began his career in radio at Sirius/XM in Washington, D.C. He later moved to New York City, where he was a producer for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s radio division. After returning to Washington D.C., Michael worked at WAMU from 2012-2015 and returned in 2017 to host/anchor. In addition to his work at WAMU, Michael is a producer at NPR. Born and raised in New York City, Michael is a graduate of Howard University’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications and currently resides in Maryland.

This is an in-person event. Seated capacity at People’s Book is 50 patrons. Standing room is an option. All events are first-come, first-served seating. Accessible seating is always available.