Reading Groups

In Short: Black Femme Transformation in 'Pemi Aguda's "Manifest" with Magenta Naaku

$45

1 Session

In stock

Saturday, 1:00 pm EDT - 2:30 pm EDT August 29, 2026

The Center for Fiction

Add to Cart

Registration includes a complimentary drink from our Café & Bar.

Series Discount: Join both groups in our Black Femme Transformation series at a discounted rate. Add this group to your cart along with Black Femme Transformation in Eloghosa Osunde’s “Grief Is the Gift That Breaks the Spirit Open” and enter the coupon code BLACKFEMME to receive the bundle price ($80 total; $72 for members).

Can physical and spiritual transformation be essential to Black femme survival, liberation, and pleasure? When does embodiment become an opportunity to shapeshift or possess others? How can rearranging our bodies to better fit our spirits lead to a mortal/supernatural collision? Who are we on the other side of possession? How do we arrange our bodies after evaporating?

Black Femme Transformation is a reading group inspired by our kin who embrace the fluidity of flesh and refuse to cage their souls. We’ll read short stories about femmes who trade in their humanity in their pursuit of pleasure and freedom, and conjure the liminality of their imaginations into full-fledged realities–for better or worse.

In ‘Pemi Aguda’s “Manifest,” a Black femme realizes she isn’t quite herself anymore. Someone or something wants control of her body, and she finds herself becoming more and more violent. This short story illustrates the tensions between temptation and surrender when one is possessed, and whether or not possession is a takeover or a becoming. We’ll contemplate how possession can be a vehicle for self-discovery and evolution, the different taboos and conceptions around possession, and how these ideas operate in West African culture.

Reading List:

“Manifest” by ‘Pemi Aguda (A copy of the story will be emailed upon registration.)

What to expect from this reading group: Participants can expect a discussion-based experience with opportunities for them to read their favorite lines/passages aloud, share their ideas and interpretations of the text, and even speculate on the before and after of the characters’ lives beyond the page. I will offer guided questions to maintain the flow of our conversations, but everyone is welcome to pose new questions to the group. Finally, as I am a writer and teaching artist, I would love to offer participants a writing prompt or two to take away each week. They can choose to journal to the prompt, use it to further their own creative practices, or as a question to contemplate until we meet again.

What to read in advance: Please read “Manifest” in its entirety. A copy of the story will be emailed upon registration.

We offer a limited number of need-based scholarships for our Reading Groups and Writing Workshops, covering 50% of tuition. Applicants selected for scholarships will be notified one week prior to the first meeting. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form.

Pricing inclusive of sales tax if applicable.

Led by

Magenta Naaku

Magenta Naaku

Magenta Naaku (she/they) is a Black queer writer, multidimensional artist, performer and educator from Brooklyn, NY. Their art contemplates Black myths, liquid portals, sexuality, freedom, afrosurrealism and the elasticity of Black femme embodiment. Through poems, portraits, performance and videos, they speculate how imagination, pleasure and afrofuturism can be tools of liberation and resistance.

Magenta is published (under Alisha Acquaye) in Carve Magazine, the Iowa Review, Plentitudes Journal, and more places. Magenta has participated in The Bandung Residency, The Free Black Women’s Library: Obsidian, StoryKnife Writers Retreat, Tin House and Rhode Island Writers Colony. When she isn’t writing, she loves to curate playlists, watch cartoons, bake pastries, dance in nature and read poems to plants.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

Groups+Workshops

More Groups+Workshops

Groups+Workshops