THE BLACK ARCHIVE SPEAKER SERIES
Lissette Norman
Cultural Worker, Poet & Author

THE BLACK ARCHIVE SPEAKER SERIES

THREE SPEAKERS. THREE GUIDED CONVERSATIONS. WINTER 2026.

Lissette Norman, Cultural Worker, Poet & Author

In conversation with Kleaver Cruz, Creative, Writer & Educator

Saturday, January 24th, 2026 from 2 – 4pm

We are excited to open The Black Archive Speaker Series with poet, author, and cultural worker Lissette Norman. Norman will introduce her new body of work titled BLACK IS MY LUCK, a personal journey exploring memory, Black Dominican identity and survival, grounded in family stories of displacement and laughter as resistance. Norman reflects on preserving her history through art and children’s books, and on navigating Blackness as a Dominican raised without the language for it. The project also insists that remembering our ancestors is not mourning, but a way of celebrating them and carrying them forward.

Norman is an Afro-Dominican poet and author of the picture books My Feet Are Laughing, Plátanos Go with Everything, and Abuela’s Library. She is also co-author of the picture books, On the Line: My Story of Becoming the First African American Rockette, Until Someone Listens, and The Girl Who Sings to Bees. Lissette was the 2025 Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Artist-in-Residence (Hill District). She was born and raised in New York City.

Kleaver Cruz (they/them) from Uptown, NYC is a Black queer Dominican-American creative, writer and educator. Kleaver believes in the power of words as a means to tell the stories that did not exist when they needed them the most. They are the Facilitator of the real-world and digital initiative The Black Joy Project, author of The Black Joy Project: A Literary and Visual Love Letter to How We Thrive (Mariner/HarperCollins) and a 2024 nominee for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Debut Author.

Photo captions:
Lissette Norman, Cultural Worker, Poet & Author. Photo by David Welch. Courtesy Lissette Norman.
Kleaver Cruz, Creative, Writer, and Educator. Photo by Stefen Pompée. Courtesy Kleaver Cruz.

The Black Archive Speaker Series is made possible through the generous support of: