Quintessential Poetry: A Global Poetry & Spoken Word Poetry Podcast

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Tzynya Pinchback is the author of the chapbook, How to Make Pink Confetti (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Poems and essays from her current manuscript, Tulle, have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Journal, the Aurorean, Mom Egg Review, Midnight & Indigo, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She writes about things at www.tzynyapinchback.com.

The primary mission of Quintessential Listening: Poetry is to provide a live format for emerging, mid-career and established poets to showcase their work. Whether traditional poetry or spoken word, the show offers an online vehicle for artists to engage in critical dialogue and discussion about poetry.

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Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and the MacDowell Colony among others. Winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, Manick was also awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. She is Founder and Curator of the reading series Soul Sister Revue; and her poem "Things I Carry Into the World" was made into a film by Motionpoems, an organization dedicated to video poetry, and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month. A performer at literary festivals, libraries, universities, and most recently the Brooklyn Museum, Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Robin Martin.

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Jessica Lyew-Ayee Flynn started her life journey in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United States at the age of eight and has since lived in various cities across the country. Her poetry explores topics on mixed-race heritage, culture shock, and the challenges within interracial marriage and cross-cultural love.

The primary mission of Quintessential Listening: Poetry is to provide a live format for emerging, mid-career and established poets to showcase their work. Whether traditional poetry or spoken word, the show offers an online vehicle for artists to engage in critical dialogue and discussion about poetry.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Adam Shames is a poet, singer-songwriter, musician, storyteller and workshop leader whose collection of poems, Dreaming of Corners (http://kreativity.net/creative-vault), is available from Lulu Press (http://www.lulu.com/shop/adam-shames/dreaming-in-corners/paperback/product-23316909.html). He founded the Kreativity Network (http://kreativity.net) in San Francisco, where he first brought groups of people together for salons, jams and workshops to explore creativity, later expanding it into his consulting practice in Chicago, through which he has designed and led leadership retreats, innovation sessions and collaboration experiences for thousands of adults and youth. Now living in DC, Adam has also been executive director of a non-profit interfaith creativity program, and is a former “Teacher of the Year” with a master’s degree from Stanford University.

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Valeri Beers is from Bangor, Maine. Her first book of poems titled ...details... published by Thomas Hill Publishing. This is her second poetry book titled "Scratching The Surface", published by Underground Writer's Association.  She has been writing all her life and is inspired to write by listening to music and needing to remember things. Valeri has been published in a number of literary magazines including anthologies by Literature Today, Lit House, The Wicked, Poets of Maine, Qutub Minar Review, Clockwise Rain, Literature Today (Vol. 1-7), Our Day of Passing, Dandelion in a Vase of Roses and Poetry Pasta  She has links to her poems on her own poetry site: wordsoftheval2000.wordpress.com. You can also connect with her on Facebook (Valeri Beers) and Twitter (@theval2000). She has been a guest poet on Quintessential Listening: Poetry before talking all things poetic and reading her own poems. Valeri also helps take poetic care of Poetry Pasta (www.poetrypasta.wordpress.com), an online poetry page that shows off new poets and their words and is also the curator of the Poetry Pasta Facebook page.

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"Reaching Out" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Indran Amirthanayagam (www.indranmx.com) is an American poet and diplomat, He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published sixteen poetry collections thus far, including the just-released Coconuts on Mars (www.paperwall.in), En busca de posada (Editorial Apogeo, Lima, 2019) and Paolo 9 (Manofalsa, Lima, 2019).  The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, NY, 1993) won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States. Uncivil War (Tsar/Mawenzi House, Toronto, 2013) tells the history of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, NY, 2008) was written in the wake of the Asian Tsunami of 2004. Other books include Il n'est de solitude que l'île lointaine (Legs Editions, Haiti, 2017), and Ventana Azul (El Tapiz del Unicornio, Mexico City, 2016), In music, he has released Rankont Dout (available to download from all the music stores). He has written on poetry for the blog  http://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com. He directs Poetry at the Port, a monthly spoken-word series at Port Au Prince restaurant in Silver Spring. He is on the Board of Directors of DC-ALT, an association of literary translators. He writes a weekly column featuring poems for the newspaper Haiti en Marche. Amirthanayagam is a past recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture and the Macdowell Colony.

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Drew Kerr is a PhD student in anthropology. While he intends for his research to engage the anthropology of militarized zones, he utilizes poetry as a tool to reflect, digest, and present his own and interlocutors’ struggles living the realities of such spaces. Having lived in India during the formative years of his political and social orientations, Drew draws on revolutionary forms and themes of South Asian poetries. Recently, Drew's exploration in poetry and performance has been nurtured by the community of the Washington, DC Guerilla Poetry Insurgency.

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Jessica Philie Park is a founding member of the DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency (GPI) and co-hosts the GPI Open Mic (https://bossadc.com/events/dcgpi-open-mic-night) every second Tuesday of the month at Bossa in Adams Morgan. She has lived in DC for 24 years and works as a bookkeeper. She started writing in her teens and did her first open mic in her twenties. Her pieces are inspired by current events and personal growth. Jessica thinks anyone could and everyone should give an open mic a shot, because it’s amazing to share with others and find out we all have so much in common.

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Heather Corbally Bryant teaches in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. She has taught at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan, and Harvard College where she won awards for her teaching. She received her A.B. with honors in History and Literature from Harvard. She received her PhD in Literature from the University of Michigan. Her academic publications include, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War (University of Michigan Press, 1992). It was awarded the Murphy Prize for best first book. In 2018, she published her work of creative nonfiction, You Can’t Wrap Fire in Paper, which explores her grandmother’s years as a journalist in Shanghai during the 1920s. Since 2011 she has published six books of poetry with the Finishing Line Press: Cheap Grace, Compass Rose, My Wedding Dress, Thunderstorm, Eve’s Lament, and James Joyce’s Water Closet (forthcoming). The Parallel Press Poetry Series of the University of Wisconsin at Madison published her chapbook, Lottery Ticket (2013). To read more please visit, https://1drv.ms/w/s!At_9Hw2EcAFFgj8WDh03U5YRWbO0

Octavio González is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley College. His first poetry collection, The Book of Ours, was a selection of the chapbook series at Letras Latinas, University of Notre Dame (Momotombo Press, 2009). He is currently working on a second poetry manuscript, tentatively titled "The Wingless Hour." To read more please visit https://1drv.ms/w/s!At_9Hw2EcAFFgj8WDh03U5YRWbO0 

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John MacDonald is a Maryland poet living in Silver Spring, near Washington, DC. He experiments in a variety of styles of poetry and poetry performance. His poems have appeared in various publications, including Gargoyle Magazine, Haiku Journal, Poetry Quarterly, and Dual Coast Magazine. Seven of his poems appear in Music of the Aztecs, an anthology featuring poets from the Washington, DC area. He has directed and presented several choral presentations of his poems, as a guest of the Performetry @ BloomBars series in Washington, DC, and is an occasional guest poet for Poetic License and Poetic Resistance, two poetry-inspired improvisational comedy troupes based in Washington, DC.