Poet Amanda Shea.

The Museum of African American History Boston campus is gearing up to host Cuisine & Creativity: An Afternoon of Lunch & Poetry on Feb. 21 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The purpose of this event is to intertwine art, food and storytelling.

In partnership with Heritage Market, the event will feature a full course meal by award-winning chef Larry J of Larry J’s BBQ Cafe and a live performance by Boston’s own poet extraordinaire Amanda Shea.

Attendees will also receive a curated tour of the 46 Joy St. museum that will highlight its Black Voices of the Revolution: Liberty, Emancipation, and the Struggle for Independence exhibition.

Sage Morgan Hubbard, the museum’s director of learning and engagement, shared more about this upcoming event and how this came to happen.

“We’ve been working with The Heritage Market, which is a local Black woman-owned organization. They came to us with the idea of doing a kind of sip-andsavor event. So, we’ve been working to build one. We’ve wanted to have more food events in our space because in [our] history, we’ve also housed catering companies. We’re the oldest Black church and in church basements, there’s always food and festivities. So, we really wanted to highlight local Black chefs,” she said.

Hubbard also talked about what prompted the museum to include poetry and food for this particular event after being in conversation with the staff at Heritage Market.

“We love to combine word and food, especially because, at our space [of] the church, the African Meeting House, there always was food and spoken word of some sort. We have on the backside of our building a wall of spoken word that has been spoken at the meeting house … folks like Frederick Douglass, Maria W. Stewart and William Lloyd Garrison have spoken at the museum,” she said. “We want to follow that tradition, but this time with more poetry and spoken word.”

Hubbard said attendees can look forward to feasting on fried okra, catfish nuggets, beef bourbon franks, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, biscuits and gravy and peach cobbler.

She also hopes that attendees will take away from this event inspiration by the words spoken and the food, along with the desire to create their own recipes and poetry.

“We would love them to walk away with some poems. Our founder, Sue Bailey Thurman, was a cookbook author among other amazing things. There’s so much, as we get into her life, that she did in her life that was incredible. One of them was she published a cookbook with the NAACP that was really special. So, it’s part of our heritage and our history,” she said. “It’s important that we share all aspects of our lives, whether it’s the meals that we make to the thoughts and dreams that we think.”

Hubbard said it is important for community members to support the museum and events like this, especially as Black history is at high risk of erasure in different places.

“It’s especially important to help and support all of our Black institutions. Right now, there is a lot of pushback against Black history, [which is] really American history,” she said. “We want to really represent all of that history, especially because so few of us know that history. …These stories really are inspiring to everyone and need to be heard. We need to be supported as an institution in order to survive.”

ON THE WEB

Learn more at maah.org/events