The following is a recording of a live reading and interview with Ekere Tallie. Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is the author of Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation (Grand Concourse Press) and Karma’s Footsteps (Flipped Eye Publishing). She is the Poetry Editor of the literary magazine African Voices. Her work focuses on women, race, ancestry, violence and the healing power of art and has been published in North American Review, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Black Renaissance Noire, VIDA, Crab Orchard Review, BOMB, Paris/Atlantic, and Listen Up! (One World Ballantine). She was also featured on The Missouri Review Soundbooth as a runner-up in their 2014 audio poetry contest. Tallie’s work has been the subject of a short film “I Leave My Colors Everywhere.” She is the recipient of a 2010 Queens Council on the Arts grant for her research on herbalists of the African Diaspora. She has taught literature and composition at York College and Medgar Evers College in New York City. Her work “Strut,” a collaboration with her husband, photographer Dominique Sindayiganza, deals with body-image, self-acceptance, and the role of capitalism in women’s issues about their appearances.