Manhattan 2025

On June 17, 2025, New York City welcomed authors V. Efua Prince and Ethan Rutherford for an intimate in-person Literary Salon in a secret speakeasy art gallery in Lower Manhattan.

V. Efua Prince is a distinguished playwright, prolific nonfiction writer, poet, and professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. Ethan Rutherford has been included in Best American Short Stories, among many others, and is the author of two story collections as well as the acclaimed novel, North Sun: Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther. In conversation was award-winning author and consummate salonnière M. M. De Voe, founder of Pen Parentis.

LP Upstairs (a new event space currently exhibiting local artists) hosted the gathering of 30 literary minds over wine and French delicacies provided by the downtown favorite La Parisienne. Bookstore McNally-Jackson vended books for signings. Many authors and writers were in attendance including Sergio Troncoso who was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s Alumni Hall of Fame, Texas Institute of Letters, and Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and Hoke S. Glover III, a poet, nonfiction writer, founder and longtime owner of Karibu Books (which he grew into the largest African American Bookstore in the country), and the current chair of the department of language, literature, and cultural studies at Bowie State University.