May 17: A Celebration of Kundiman at Verlaine with Aziza Barnes, Cornelius Eady, Shonni Enelow, Rigoberto González, Monica Sok, Christopher Soto, & Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
Join us for a blowout CELEBRATION OF VERLAINE: a cross-cultural, cross-generational poetry carousal featuring:
AZIZA BARNES, CORNELIUS EADY, RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ, MONICA SOK, CHRISTOPHER SOTO, & KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI
Sunday, May 17
Verlaine Bar & Lounge
110 Rivington St, New York, NY
Happy hour: 4-5pm
Feature Reading: 5pm
$5 suggested donation
BIOS:
AZIZA BARNES is blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Bedstuy, New York. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the Exploding Pinecone Prize and published from Button Poetry. You can find her work in PANK, pluck!, Muzzle, Callaloo, Union Station, and other journals. She is a poetry & non-fiction editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, a Callaloo fellow and graduate from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is a member of The Dance Cartel & the divine fabrics collective. She loves a good suit & anything to do with Motown.
CORNELIUS EADY is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (Putnam, April 2008). His second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1985; in 2001 Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work in theater includes the libretto for an opera, “Running Man,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999. His play, “Brutal Imagination,” won Newsday’s Oppenheimer award in 2002. In 1996 Eady co-founded, with writer Toi Derricotte, the Cave Canem summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. More than a decade later, Cave Canem is a thriving national network of black poets, as well as an institution offering regional workshops, readings, a first book prize, and the summer retreat.
SHONNI ENELOW writes for and about theater and performance. She is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University. Her latest work of theater, The Power of Emotion, premiered this January in the Public Theatre's Under the Radar Festival Incoming Series. Her performance lecture, "My Dinner with Bernard Frechtman," was recently published in Aufgabe. Her critical monograph, Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-drama, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.
RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ is the author 15 books, most recently the poetry collection Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. A professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey, he is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA and USA Rolón fellowships; a NYFA grant in poetry; the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Poetry Center Book Award; the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award; and the 2015 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle.
MONICA SOK is a Cambodian poet from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Currently, she is completing an MFA in poetry at New York University. A Kundiman fellow, her poems are forthcoming in Narrative, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.
CHRISTOPHER SOTO (aka LOMA) is a queer latin@ punk poet and prison abolitionist. They are currently curating Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color in collaboration with The Lambda Literary Foundation. They have work published in Columbia: A Journal , MiPOesias, Apogee Journal and more. They are an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU and the 2014-2015 Intern at Poetry Society of America.
KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI is an award-winning spoken word poet, playwright, and filmmaker whose work has been featured at over 600 venues worldwide including the White House, Apollo Theater in Harlem, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, BAM, Tyra Banks’ Flawsome Ball, & three seasons of “HBO Def Poetry.” Award recipient of the Illinois Arts Council, Asian American Arts Alliance, New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian Women Giving Circle, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Kelly has been profiled on Idealist in NYC’s Top 40 NYC’ers Who Make Positive Social Change, AngryAsianMan.com’s “30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30,” and HBO’s “East of Main Street: Asians Aloud.”
Get there early for drinks, seats, and chat!