PREVIOUS AWAY MESSAGE(S):
READING #1: FRIDAY, MARCH 27TH, 7:30 PM EST
Venmo donate @ zef-lisowski to help pay performers (suggested donation: $10)
Kay Ulanday Barrett aka @Brownroundboi is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. K. has featured at The Lincoln Center, The U.N., Symphony Space, Princeton University, Tucson Poetry Festival, NY Poetry Festival, The Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, & Brooklyn Museum. They are a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net Split This Rock 2019 nominee, and 2019 Queeroes Literary Honoree by Them. They've been offered fellowships and residencies from Lambda Literary Review, VONA/Voices, Monson Arts, VCCA, and Macondo as well as Guest Faculty for The Poetry Foundation. Their contributions are found in Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, Asian American Literary Review, PBS News Hour, F(r)iction, The Huffington Post, Bitch Magazine, & more. Their first book, When The Chant Comes was published by Topside Press in 2016. More Than Organs, published by Sibling Rivalry Press, is their second collection. Currently, Kay lives outside of NYC area with his jowly dog. Buy Kay's new book here.
Cyree Jarelle Johnson is a librarian and writer from Piscataway, New Jersey. They hold a MS in Library and Information Science from Drexel University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. He is the author of two books, SLINGSHOT (2019), a 2020 Lamba Literary Award Finalist, and How Greek Immigrants Made America Home (2018). Cyree’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, Rewire News, The Root, and MOTHERBOARD/Vice. They have given speeches and lectures at The White House, TEDxColumbia University, Brown University, The University of Pennsylvania, community organizations, churches, festivals, and conferences throughout the United States. His work has been supported by Davis Putter Scholarship Fund, Astraea Foundation, Leeway Foundation, Disabled Writers, Culture/Strike, and the donations of countless community members who believe in what he does. Buy Cyrée's book here.
moira j. is an agender writer of Dził Łigai Si'an N'dee descent. They were the winner of the 2018 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and were Frontier Poetry’s 2019 Frontier New Voices Fellow. Their work is published/forthcoming in The Shallow Ends, WILDNESS, and Black Warrior Review. They currently live with their partner in the occupied Massachusett homelands of Nutohkemminnit (Greater Boston). Their debut poetry collection, “Bury Me in Thunder” (January 29, 2020) is out now with Sundress Publications. You can find more of their work at http://moiraj.com, or on Twitter
@mxmoiraj; buy their debut here.
Jesse Rice-Evans (any pronouns) is a white neuroqueer femme and Southern poet based in NYC, unceded Lenape territory, studying access pedagogy and digital culture. Read her work in The Wanderer, Yes Poetry, and Nat. Brut, among others, and in her debut collection The Uninhabitable (2019) from Sibling Rivalry Press; buy it here.
Follow along at this link for an access copy
READING #2: FRIDAY, APRIL 17TH, 7:30 PM EST
Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. They are the author of the novel, On Hell (2018), which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. Their collection of poems, essays, and performances, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, will be published by Sming Sming and Wolfman in September 2020. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, and Black Warrior Review, and is anthologized in GenderFail and Asian American Literary Review. Their essay "Sick Woman Theory," published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into six languages. Their work has been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Their album The Sun and the Moon was released in March 2019. Since 2018, they’ve been touring Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, a doom metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean shamanist ritual.
jayy dodd is a blxk trans womxn from los angeles, california– now based in Portland,OR. she is a artist, writer, & curator. her work has been featured in LitHub, Poetry Foundation, Oprah Magazine, Ms. Magazine, The New York Public Library among others. she is the Executive Director for Dovesong Labs (a development of Winter Tangerine), editor of A Portrait in Blues (Platypus Press 2017), author of Mannish Tongues (Platypus Press 2017) & The Black Condition ft. Narcissus (Nightboat Books 2019). she has been a Pushcart nominee, co-editor of Bettering American Poetry. she is a Lambda Literary Fellow & a PICA Precipice Grant Recipient.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, second-generation Colombian immigrant, poet, artist, scholar, and activist. She is the author of the poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), which won the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her creative work has been published, exhibited, and performed in As/Us, Pank, Raspa, Word Riot, Feminist Studies, Huizache, the National Queer Arts Festival, The Sick Collective, the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, SomArts, and Galería de la Raza, among other places. She was a semi-finalist for the 2017 92-Y/Unterburg Poetry Center Discovery Contest, and a semi-finals judge for the 2017 Youth Speaks/Brave New Voices National Poetry Slam Competition. Born in Arizona and raised in California, she currently lives in Brooklyn. Buy her book here.
Travis Chi Wing Lau is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and will be Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic British Literature at Kenyon College in the Fall. He specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, health humanities, and disability studies. Lau has published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Digital Defoe, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, as well as venues for public scholarship like Public Books and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, The New Engagement and in a chapbook, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019).
READING # 3: FRIDAY, MAY 29TH, 7:30 PM EST
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the 2019 Whiting Award winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Buzzfeed Reader, and Poetry Magazine, where her poem “f = [(root) (future)]” was honored with the 2019 Friends of Literature Prize. She is a recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo and Jack Jones Literary Arts, and is a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog.
George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet from Jacksonville, FL. They are a Kundiman fellow, a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and a recipient of the College Union Poetry Slam’s Best Poet title. They are the author of the debut poetry collection, Birthright (Button Poetry, April 2020), as well as the chapbooks the specimen’s apology (Sibling Rivalry Press) and al youm (the Atlas Review). Their work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Paris Review, LitHub, West Branch, Mizna, and elsewhere. They are currently based in Somerville, MA where they are a PhD Candidate in Bioengineering at Harvard University
Joselia Hughes (b.1988, New York, NY) is a Black Caribbean-american writer and self-taught allodisciplinary artist living with Sickle-cell SC disease. Utilizing creative non-fiction, fiction, poetry, anagramming, tweet threads, visual and performance art, knitting and archival study, she works to untangle the language(s) of liminality; instruments abstractions on the conditions of Blackness; interrogates reclamation and refusal through play; and reappraises societal perceptions of ability, chronic illness and disability to imagine and concretize alternative passages of survival. She has performed at bookstores and art centers around New York City including The Strand, Bronx Art Space, Participant Inc, and National Sawdust.
Rax King is a James Beard award-nominated bitch. She is the author of the collection 'The People's Elbow: Thirty Recitatives on Rape and Wrestling' (Ursus Americanus, 2018) and the forthcoming essay collection 'Tacky' (Vintage). Her work can also be found in Glamour, Catapult, and Electric Literature. Look out for her monthly column Store-Bought is Fine for hot takes about the Food Network.
George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet from Jacksonville, FL. They are a Kundiman fellow, a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and a recipient of the College Union Poetry Slam’s Best Poet title. They are the author of the debut poetry collection, Birthright (Button Poetry, April 2020), as well as the chapbooks the specimen’s apology (Sibling Rivalry Press) and al youm (the Atlas Review). Their work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Paris Review, LitHub, West Branch, Mizna, and elsewhere. They are currently based in Somerville, MA where they are a PhD Candidate in Bioengineering at Harvard University
Joselia Hughes (b.1988, New York, NY) is a Black Caribbean-american writer and self-taught allodisciplinary artist living with Sickle-cell SC disease. Utilizing creative non-fiction, fiction, poetry, anagramming, tweet threads, visual and performance art, knitting and archival study, she works to untangle the language(s) of liminality; instruments abstractions on the conditions of Blackness; interrogates reclamation and refusal through play; and reappraises societal perceptions of ability, chronic illness and disability to imagine and concretize alternative passages of survival. She has performed at bookstores and art centers around New York City including The Strand, Bronx Art Space, Participant Inc, and National Sawdust.
Rax King is a James Beard award-nominated bitch. She is the author of the collection 'The People's Elbow: Thirty Recitatives on Rape and Wrestling' (Ursus Americanus, 2018) and the forthcoming essay collection 'Tacky' (Vintage). Her work can also be found in Glamour, Catapult, and Electric Literature. Look out for her monthly column Store-Bought is Fine for hot takes about the Food Network.
