Tolbert, MaKshya / Shade Is a Place
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MaKshya Tolbert practices poetry and placemaking in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. She is the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Shade is a place is her first book. In her free time, she is elsewhere--a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls "that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe."
Shade is a place meanders east-west along Charlottesville's Downtown Mall, seeking "a Black sense of place" at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall's architectural history, and the speaker's ongoing questions and reflections. The collection of poems is a moving invitation to open one's attention by looking up, down, and always within. Through lyric walking poems ("tree walks" and "shade walks") and Bashō-style travelogue, Shade is a place unfolds as much through arboreal life as through one's inner life--sometimes alone, sometimes with others, and always among turning trees.
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9780143138457
Penguin Books
November 2025
Paperback
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Tolbert, MaKshya / Shade Is a Place