Date: Wednesday Aug 20th, 2025 

Time: 7:30pm - 8:30pm 

Venue: Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton St, Brooklyn, NY 11217 

Presented in partnership with Greenlight Bookstores | Made possible by a BAC Support Local Arts Grant  

Event Description: 

In How to Be Unmothered, writer and cultural worker Camille U. Adams crafts a memoir-in-essays that traverses loss, migration, and the delicate work of self-remaking. It is a narrative of what it means to live without a mother figure, and how the act of unmothering – whether by death, estrangement, or silence – can become both wound and womb. Told with searing honesty and lyrical precision, Adams’s debut is a meditation on grief, lineage, and the rituals we create in the absence of the ones we longed for. This event continues the BCLF’s deep and ongoing excavation of Caribbean motherhood – a theme we have returned to in years past through poetry, fiction, and conversation. How to Be Unmothered furthers that exploration with grace, bravery, and emotional clarity. 

In conversation with multidisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural strategist Niama Sandy, Adams will reflect on the making of the book, the ancestral silences it confronts, and what it means to mother oneself into becoming. 

This gathering, ahead of the full bloom of the 2025 festival, is not only a celebration of a new work, but also a kind of vigil. An intimate communion with the stories that root and remake us. 

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.