This event is free, please reserve your seat by clicking book tickets above.

The event is full at 200 attendees, so please arrive early to guarantee admission. RSVP alone does not guarantee admission to the event, there is a limited capacity – first come, first served.

Please note that in order to create wider access to our work, BCS records each Baltimore Butterfly Session on film to be released on our YouTube channel.

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Bakari Jones (Keynote Speaker)

Bakari Jones is a consultant based in Baltimore, Maryland. Bakari’s work centers traditionally marginalized communities including Black, women, LGBTQ and gender non-conforming communities. Black Feminist Thought, Black Liberation Theology, and ‘Black joy’ as a mantra of resistance influence Bakari’s approach to storytelling, facilitating, coaching, and consulting. Bakari earned a BA in African American studies from Temple University’s College of Liberal Arts. After serving as an AmeriCorps V.I.S.T.A. (Volunteer In Service To America) in post-Katrina New Orleans, Bakari returned to Baltimore and began creating events for Black, queer, and gender non-conforming folx in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Bakari then earned an MBA from Loyola University Maryland.In addition to supporting communications strategy for Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, Bakari also serves as the Empower Baltimore Program Manager at Impact Hub Baltimore. The Empower Program, sponsored by GoDaddy, helps microbusiness owners (those with 10 employees or less) develop and update their websites.

Kenneth Something (Poetry Feature)

Kenneth is an artist, organizer and educator from Baltimore, Maryland. For over a decade, Kenneth has worked to create art and institutions that connect and transform people. Most recently, his work centers around marginalized people gaining access to their intellectual, emotional, spiritual and creative traditions. Kenneth has many accomplishments including but not limited to: having his art on display at Baltimore Museum of Art, publishing two collections of poetry, confounding DewMore Baltimore and Baltimore Youth Initiative High School, becoming a national poetry slam champion and being a professor at MICA. Kenneth has had the opportunity to teach, work and live many places around the country but Baltimore is his favorite place to create and build.

Radical Evolution (Musical Guest)

Radical Evolution is a multiethnic producing collective committed to creating artistic events that seek to understand the complexities of the mixed-identity existence in the 21st Century.

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The Baltimore Butterfly Sessions: A civic dialogue series at BCS

Inspired by Citizen University’s Civic Saturdays, The Baltimore Butterfly Sessions will bring together music, poetry, literary excerpts and thought-provoking keynote addresses to catalyze conversation and build awareness around today’s most pressing issues. Tapping into some of the brightest voices around the nation and in Baltimore, each Butterfly Session will convene artists, activists, organizers and thinkers to unpack a civically resonant topic. Through the Baltimore Butterfly Sessions, BCS aims to create a space for civic dialogue & fellowship across differences and stay firmly rooted in our local community. Come for the music, come for the poetry, come for the conversation.

 

Why “The Baltimore Butterfly Sessions”?

A symbol of growth and emergence, transformation and borderless migration, butterflies remind us that tiny shifts in one place can set profound change in motion. Butterflies also have a special resonance in Baltimore. You may or may not know that the city of Baltimore is sometimes referred to as a “Black Butterfly and White L.” According to Dr. Lawrence Brown of Morgan State University, “Baltimore’s hypersegregated neighborhoods experience radically different realities.” Typically, Black neighborhoods fan out to the east and west resembling the shape of a butterfly while white neighborhoods run down the center of the city in the shape of an “L.”

Through the Baltimore Butterfly Sessions, BCS aims to create a space for civic dialogue & fellowship across difference and stay firmly rooted in our local community.

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