Three contemporary poets—Shayla Lawson, Stephanie Adams-Santos, and Jane Wong—share their poetry and discuss their work and inspirations. In 2018, Literary Arts hosted a free reading series called Poets on Broadway, in collaboration with Portland’5 Centers for the Arts, in the Antoinette Hatfield Hall in downtown Portland. This episode features recordings from those events, with Lawson sharing selections from her book of poetry I Think I’m Ready to Meet Frank Ocean, Adams-Santos from Swarm Queen’s Crown, and Wong from Overpour.

Shayla Lawson is the author of three books of poetry—A Speed Education in Human Being, the chapbook PANTONE, AND I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean—and the forthcoming essay collection MAJOR: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, & Being Dope {AF} (Harper Perennial, 2020). Her work has appeared in print and online at Tin House, GRAMMA, ESPN, Salon, The Offing, Guernica, Colorado Review, Barrelhouse, and MiPOesias. She curates The Tenderness Project with Ross Gay and writes poems with Chet’la Sebree. A MacDowell and Yaddo Artist Colony Fellow, Lawson currently serves as Writer-in-Residence and Chair of Creative Writing at Amherst College.

Stephanie Adams-Santos is a multidisciplinary Guatemalan-American writer and educator whose work spans poetry, prose, screenwriting, and hybrid genres. Her full-length poetry collection, Swarm Queen’s Crown (Fathom Books, 2016) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, which celebrates excellence in LGBTQ voices. She is also the author of Total Memory, Little Fugues, and the award-winning chapbook The Sundering, selected for a New York Chapbook Fellowship. Stephanie has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and was a finalist for a Corporeal Voices fellowship for Writers of Color. Her work has appeared in many print and online journals and magazines, including Guernica, The Boston Review, Orion Magazine, and others. 

Jane Wong is the author of Overpour and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James Books, 2021). Wong’s poems can be found in places such as Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, POETRY, AGNI, Third Coast, New England Review, and others. Her essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, 4Culture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Willapa Bay AiR, Hedgebrook, the Jentel Foundation, SAFTA, and Mineral School.