After attending the funeral of literary icon James Baldwin in 1987, poets Sharan Strange and Thomas Sayers Ellis, then Harvard undergraduates, with poet-composer Janice Lowe, a Berklee College of Music student, co-founded the Dark Room Reading Series in 1988.
[1] The Dark Room Collective hosted a writing workshop and gatherings of black artists and writers at the house.
[2] They were visited by African-American writers including Alice Walker, bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Derek Walcott, Samuel R. Delany, poet Essex Hemphill, Randall Kenan, Terry McMillan, Ntozake Shange, John Edgar Wideman, and Walter Mosley.
[2] The Dark Room Collective has been influential in contemporary American and African-American poetry, inspiring the creation of the Cave Canem Foundation[2] and including many alumni who went on to be highly successful.
Future United States Poets Laureate Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith, New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young, Carl Phillips, Major Jackson, Patrick Sylvain, Tisa Bryant, Danielle Legros Georges, Artress Bethany White, Trasi Johnson, Adisa Beatty, Nehassaiu deGannes, Donia Allen, Della Scott and John Keene were among the members of the collective.