PGHwrites: Sony Ton-Aime’s “Konbit” (Book Launch) with Fellow Poets Shara McCallum & Joy Priest

Photo Credit: John Beale

What would a future beyond colonialism, imperialism, and climate catastrophe look like? This is the world imagined in Sony Ton-Aime’s debut poetry collection, Konbit, which takes its title from the Haitian Creole word for community-centered, communal lives. This March, Sony visits City of Asylum with friends and fellow poets Shara McCallum—whose work many of Sony’s poems pay homage to and enter into conversation with—and Joy Priest, who will moderate the program.

Konbit is not only a word in Haitian Creole; it is a way of living for which there is no direct translation in the English language. It captures the essence of communal life in Haiti and is applied to any event that calls on neighbors to help one another. The poems in this collection revolve around the Bois-Caïman ceremony (the first konbit) when enslaved people in Saint-Domingue vowed to fight for their independence. Not unlike our own society, societal structures and systems that grew around enslaved people in Saint-Domingue were created to uphold and maintain a status quo where power and change were held out of reach, and where imagining an alternative would only be seen as futile. 

And yet, imagine they did. Sony Ton-Aime’s Konbit is the descendant of one such imagining, attempting to emulate that first konbit and declare that believing in change is never futile. With poems influenced by and in conversation with Tyehimba Jess, Natasha Trethewey, Derek Walcott, Shara McCallum, and Adrian Matejka, Sony Ton-Aime aims to provide a new language to articulate our common past, present, and future.

This program will be followed by a public reception for discussion and community building. Light refreshments will be provided. 

Purchase Sony’s debut poetry collection, Konbit, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Artists:

Sony Ton-Aime is a Haitian poet, essayist, translator, and Executive Director of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures. He is the author of the poetry collection, Konbit (CMU Press, 2026), the chapbook, LaWomann (2019), the Haitian Creole translation of Olympic Hero: The Lennox Kilgour’s Story, and co-founding editor of ID13. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in Artful Dodge, Cream City Review, Idaho Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Cleveland Review of Books, and Consequence Forum, among others.

Shara McCallum is the author of seven books published in the US and UK, including Behold (2026); No Ruined Stone, winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry; and Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry. From Jamaica and of Jamaican and Venezuelan parentage, she is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University and a 2026–27 Cheney Creative Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK.

About the Moderator:

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her work—including poems, essays, and cultural criticism—has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The New Republic, Sewanee Review, and Transition Magazine, among others. Priest is on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in Creative Writing and a curator at the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics. Her second collection of poems, The Black Outside, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2027.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is open for brunch from 9:30 to 2 p.m. and for dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Please visit OpenTable or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.