Come celebrate (or mourn) the end of summer with a spirited poetry reading featuring young poets from NYC and beyond! Featuring Gaia Rajan, Anthony Thomas Lombardi, I.S Jones, Olivia Muenz, Tawanda Mulalu, Haolun Xu.
Gaia Rajan is the author of the chapbooks Moth Funerals (Glass Poetry Press 2020) and Killing It (Black Lawrence Press 2022). Her work is published or forthcoming in the 2022 Best of the Net anthology, The Kenyon Review, THRUSH, Split Lip Magazine, diode, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the cofounder of the WOC Speak Reading Series and the Web Manager for Honey Literary. You can find her at @gaiarajan on Twitter or Instagram.
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a Pushcart-nominated poet, editor, organizer, activist, and educator. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered reading series partnered with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that raises funds for transnational relief efforts, bail funds, and mutual aid organizations, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. He has taught for the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Polyphony Lit’s Summer Editorial Apprenticeship Program, and community programming throughout New York City. A recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, his work has appeared or will soon in the Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet, essayist, and music journalist. She is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. She is the co-editor of The Young African Poets Anthology: The Fire That Is Dreamed Of (Agbowó, 2020) and served as the inaugural nonfiction guest editor for Lolwe. She is an Editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, freelanced for Complex, Revolt TV, NBC News THINK, and elsewhere. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Offing and elsewhere. Her poem “Vanity” was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She received her MFA in Poetry at UW–Madison where she was the inaugural 2019–2020 Kemper K. Knapp University Fellowship and the 2021-2022 Hoffman Hall Emerging Artist Fellowship recipient. From 2019 to 2022, she served as the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory, a community-driven contemporary arts center in Madison, Wisconsin. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) is out with Newfound. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Frontier Poetry.
Olivia Muenz is the author of chapbook Where Was I Again (Essay Press). She holds an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University, where she received the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award in prose and served as an editor for New Delta Review. A ‘22 Tin House Summer Workshop participant, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Pleaides, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at LSU. Find her online at oliviamuenz.com.
Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. He is the author of Nearness (The New Delta Review, 2022) and Please make me pretty, I don't want to die (Princeton University Press, 2022). His poems appear or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Lana Turner, Lolwe, The New England Review, The Paris Review, A Public Space and elsewhere. He mains Ken in Street Fighter.
Haolun Xu won Second Place in Narrative’s Thirteenth Annual Poetry Contest and is the author of the chapbook Ultimate Sun Cell (2021). Born in Nanning, China, he immigrated to the United States and was raised in New Jersey, where he graduated from Rutgers University.