The Dark Room Collective was an influential African-American poetry collective. Established in the late 1980s, the collective hosted a reading series that featured leading figures in Black literature.
After attending the funeral of literary icon James Baldwin in 1987, poets Sharan Strange and Thomas Sayers Ellis, Harvard undergraduates, with poet-composer Janice Lowe, a Berklee College of Music student, co-founded the Dark Room Reading Series in 1988. The series was named for a project called The Dark Room: A Collection of Black Writing, a library containing the works of black authors which was hosted in a former darkroom on the third floor of their Victorian house in Cambridge.
The Dark Room Collective hosted a writing workshop and gatherings of black artists and writers at the house. They were visited by African-American literary luminaries such as Alice Walker, bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Derek Walcott, Samuel R. Delany, poet Essex Hemphill, Randall Kenan, Terry McMillan, Ntozake Shange, John Edgar Wideman, and Walter Mosley. They hosted a reading series that paired older writers with younger ones. The group was influenced by Rita Dove and inspired the creation of the Cave Canem Foundation. Following problems with their landlord, they relocated the reading series to the Institute of Contemporary Art and later to the Boston Playwrights' Theatre.
The Dark Room Collective has been influential in contemporary American and African-American poetry. Many members of the Dark Room Collective went on to be successful in their own right. Natasha Trethewey, Tracy K. Smith, Kevin Young, Colson Whitehead, Carl Phillips, Major Jackson, Patrick Sylvain, Tisa Bryant, Danielle Legros-Georges, Artress Bethany White, Trasi Johnson, Adisa Beatty, Nehassaiu deGannes, Donia Allen, Della Scott and John Keene were among the members of the collective.