The Green Line Cafe Poetry Series & Poetry in Common Present a reading with Raena Shirali, Steven Kleinman, Elizabeth Scanlon, and Alexander Coco. Hosted by Jen Anolik.More info here.

Join us for the recording of an episode of LIVE at the Writers House featuring writers affiliated with Blue Stoop, a new literary hub in Philadelphia. The reading will feature Joshua Demaree, Thomas Devaney, Boston Gordon, Berry Grass, and Raena Shirali, and musical guest Joey Sweeney. 


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Blue Stoop, named after a poem by Thomas Devaney, which was in turn inspired by a photograph by Zoey Strauss, is a literary space for writers in Philly to meet, work, take or offer high-quality and inclusive writing classes, as well as an organization hosting reading and events. It's currently spearheaded by Joshua Demaree and Emma Eisenburg. 

LIVE at the Writers House is a long-standing collaboration of the people of the Kelly Writers House and of WXPN (88.5 FM). Six times annually between September and April, the Writers House airs a one-hour broadcast of poetry, music, and other spoken-word art, along with one musical guest -- from our Arts Cafe onto the airwaves at WXPN. "LIVE" is broadcast on WXPN. "LIVE" is made possible through the generous support of BigRoc. More info here.

Join us for a poetry reading and discussion with Tarfia Faizullah and Raena Shirali!

Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, Registers of Illuminated Villages, extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices—elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah, the author of the award-winning collection Seam, is an essential poet, whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and—even in its unsparing brutality—full of love.

More info here.

Celebrating the release of Yoon's A Cruelty Special to Our Species. More info here.

In her arresting collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on Korean so-called “comfort women,” women who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II.

In wrenching language, A Cruelty Special to Our Species unforgettably describes the brutalities of war and the fear and sorrow of those whose lives and bodies were swept up by a colonizing power, bringing powerful voice to an oppressed group of people whose histories have often been erased and overlooked. “What is a body in a stolen country,” Yoon asks. “What is right in war.”

Moving readers through time, space, and different cultures, and bringing vivid life to the testimonies and confessions of the victims, Yoon takes possession of a painful and shameful history even while unearthing moments of rare beauty in acts of resistance and resilience, and in the instinct to survive and bear witness.

Winner Kathryn Hargett, Judge Yolanda Wisher, and Preliminary Judge Raena Shirali will be reading at this event, the signature evening for the third annual Brittany Noakes Poetry Award. 

Wine and snacks will be served, 50/50 raffle, $5 suggested donation (which gives you one entry for the door prize raffle, tailor made for poetry lovers). Excitingly, the broadsides made of Kathryn Hargett's winning poem by artist and poet MaryAnn L. Miller will make their debut (as well as be available for purchase).

All proceeds of the award's entry fees fund SI/Rittenhouse Square's Live Your Dream Awards, a cash grant given to a woman who is head of her household, has experienced hardships, and is undergoing financial difficulties.More info here.

Join us for a VERY SPECIAL LITERARY EVENT on the beautiful terrace of the ICA, hosted by Zach Blackwood & Alina Pleskova.

It’s called FRANKS O’HARA because there will be: poetry (we looooove Frank O’Hara & most likely you do, too), hot dogs, & tofu pups provided by a very generous donor. Readers include: Gala Mukomolova, Sebastian Castillo, Jonathan Burkhalter, Kirwyn Sutherland, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, & Tyler Antoine

*FREE HOT DOGS & BEER FOR ALL*

More info here. Please also RSVP on Facebook if you can, so the hosts can provide an accurate amount of hot dogs! 

Written in response the PROMESA bill (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act) bill, lo terciario/the tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera offers a decolonial queer critique and reconsideration of Marx. The book’s titles come from Pedro Scaron’s, El Capital, the 1976 translation of Karl Marx’s classic. Published by Siglo Veintiuno Editores, this translation was commonly used by the Puerto Rican left as part of political formation programs. Lo terciario/the tertiary places this text in relation to the Puerto Rican debt crisis, forcing readers to reconsider old questions when facing colonialism’s newest horrors.

https://timelessinfinitelight.com/collections/books/products/loterciario

Readers:

Kirwyn Sutherland
Raena Shirali
Ashley Davis
Frank Sherlock
Sanam Sheriff
Gabriel Ojeda-Sague

Reading for ON BEING MISTAKEN's launch party. LAURA BUCCIERI observes, confronts, and explores queer womanhood in her collection On Being Mistaken. This is an exciting, experimental, and rhythmic voice that creates a space in which we can explore how we are labeled and how we ourselves label. Buccieri doesn’t beg for answers but rather urges us to expand our language, assumptions, and ideologies. Proceeds from on being mistaken will benefit the Audre Lorde Project and The Lower East Side Girls Club. More info here.

Come join us in celebrating the release of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America. THIS IS A FREE EVENT. The poets anthologized in this book bear witness to, rage against, and defy the misogyny, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and authoritarian impulses that have always surrounded us, but that are incarnated in the 45th president. Readers include:

Dante Di Stefano
Brian Fanelli
Leah Umansky
George Guida
Rosebud Ben-Oni
Bruce Bennett
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Tony Gleogger
Vincent Toro
Ranea Shirali
Christine Gelineau
Nicole Santalucia

Book Description:

https://books.nyq.org/title/misrepresented_people

More info here. 

In blending the found with the invented, and the researched with the lived, poets inhabit speakers that both approximate and diverge from their experiences. Five women poets will share their work and situate their speakers on a spectrum from near self to complete persona. In doing so, they will explore identity and appropriation, examining how to access otherness responsibly in persona poems and how to distill art from mere biography when the speaker is an avatar of the self.

Moderator:
Amie Whittemore is the author of Glass Harvest, an educator, and cofounder of the Charlottesville Reading Series. Her poems have appeared in North American Review, Smartish Pace, Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review poem of the week, and elsewhere.

Panelists:
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire, which won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from SIR Press. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and she won the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.

Raena Shirali is the author of Gilt and is a Pushcart Prize recipient. Her honors include the spring 2017 Philip Roth Residency, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, and a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. She currently serves as a poetry reader for Muzzle magazine.

Shelley Wong is the author of the chapbook Rare Birds. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Southern Humanities Review, The Volta, Sixth Finch, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a MacDowell fellowship.

Claudia Cortese is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her first full-length, Wasp Queen, is a hybrid collection of prose poems and stories. Cortese is also the author of two chapbooks: Blood Medals and The Red Essay and Other Histories. Cortese teaches at Montclair State University.

Great readings require great audiences, and at this event, we hope to have everyone sharing work. From 6:00-7:15, join poets Ruth Awad, Katie Condon, Christopher Costabile, Kimberly Grey, Rosalie Moffett, Raena Shirali, Amie Whittemore, Shelley Wong, and Allison Pitinii Davis for brief poetry readings. After, please join in an optional workshop where we’ll continue to share and discuss writing as a collective group. Find the AWP listing here & the Facebook event here. 

 Reading with Steven Karl, Boston Gordon, and Steven Perez. Doors open at 7pm and the reading starts at 8pm. More info here. 

Celebrate Amy Saul Zerby's second collection of poetry, Deep Camouflage, which is coming out on Civil Coping Mechanisms, featuring readings alongside Zach Blackwood, Prarie M. Faul, Amy, & yours truly. More info here.

Free entry / 21+. Doors at 7:30pm & readings promptly at 8:00pm. More info here.

Guest-conducting a workshop run by Marty McConnell. Stay tuned for more info here. Interested participants should email voxferus@gmail.com to RSVP.