“Call Me Yes” by Sarah Browning – DC Book Launch
Date and Time
Nov 22, 2026 5:00 pm
Location
Takoma
235 Carroll St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20012
Nov 22, 2026 5:00 pm
Takoma
“In work that reads equally as a love letter to both Washington DC and Philadelphia and simultaneously chronicles the jagged heartbreak of divorce and the surprise of new love, in Call Me Yes Sarah Browning covers life’s ever-changing landscape with poems that sing to the body and make a boldface call to pleasure.” – Teri Ellen Cross Davis, author of a more perfect Union
“These poems yank desire from the staid lines of rhyme and form, instead enacting pleasure and pain with a rare immediacy. Browning gives us the indispensable authentic voice in a book that’s not afraid to be broken, hungry, and wildly ravenous. In ‘Tongued,’ ‘the tongue writes its own/ constitution right here in our beds.’ This is a rousing book in which the clitoris speaks, and it says Yes, yes, oh yes! And you will too, dear reader, as you breathe in these stirring, dazzling poems.” – Jan Beatty, author of DragstrippingSarah Browning is the award-winning author of three collections of poems, Call Me Yes (The Word Works, 2026), Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and many other journals and anthologies. She is the co-curator/co-host of Wild Indigo Poetry Series in Philadelphia and teaches poetry workshops and accountability groups for Writers in Progress. She also works with writers one-on-one, as an editor, coach, and consultant. She is co-founder and was Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness for 10 years. An Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, she received an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction at Rutgers University Camden. Browning is the 2019 recipient of the Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award and of artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Porches, the Corporation of Yaddo, Mesa Refuge, Swift Waters, the Creative Communities Initiative, and the Adirondack Center for Writing. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, Origins, and three issues of POETRY magazine. From 2006 to 2019 Browning co-hosted the Sunday Kind of Love poetry series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. She has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Browning is a columnist for the Other Words op ed service and her essays have appeared in newspapers around the country, in Common Dreams, Utne Reader, Sojourners, The Writer’s Notebook, VIDA Review, and other venues. She previously worked supporting socially engaged women artists with WomenArts and developing creative writing workshops with low-income women and youth with Amherst Writers & Artists. She has been a community organizer in Boston public housing and a grassroots political organizer on a host of social and political issues. FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
