the Poetry Project Podcast

Friday Reading Series

Risa Puleo Talk: How to Look at Monsters?

Risa Puleo will look at two types of “monsters”–those persons deviating from the physical norm of a group, be it through difference in ability, race, sex or gender– especially prevalent in 17th Century Europe: hermaphrodites and hirsute women to examine how Baroque portraiture preserves, displays and reproduces the monstrous body. Co-created by early modern gynecology as it intersects with the Spanish colonial project and the rise of collecting art, objects and people, monsters challenged the social categories of Animal and Human; Male and Female in the early modern era and offer an alternative for challenging these categories today. Puleo’s talk will be followed by a discussion moderated by Jennifer Miller.

Risa Puleo is a curator and writer living in Brooklyn, NY.

Friday Reading Series

Janice A. Lowe, composer and poet, is a co-founder of the Dark Room Collective. Her collection, Leaving CLE poems of nomadic dispersal (Miami University Press) moves from Cleveland to NYC to Tuscaloosa’s “schoolhouse door” and back. She is also the author of the chapbook SWAM (Belladonna Series). Her poems have been published in Callaloo, American Poetry Review, In the Tradition and The Hat and appear on a digital album with Drew Gardner’s Poetics Orchestra. Her essays have appeared in Sing the Sun Up and The Cleveland Neighborhood Guidebook. She was a writer-in-residence with Melted Away’s The American Dream Project. A Jonathan Larson Dramatists Guild Fellow, she is the composer of 5 full-length musicals and well over 200 songs for theater/musical theater/opera, which have been performed extensively in New York City and regionally. Her love of setting all manner of text to music has resulted in collaborations with writers Tyehimba Jess, Nehassaiu deGannes, Jenni Lamb and others. As a pianist-vocalist, she has performed with The Jones Twins and with the experimental bands w/o a net, HAGL and Digital Diaspora. She teaches youth songwriting workshops and has taught Poetry and Performance at Purchase College and at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. She holds an MFA in Musical Theater Writing from NYU-Tisch School of the Arts.

Pamela Sneed is a New York based poet and actress. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, Bomb, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery (Henry Holt, 1998), KONG (Vintage Entity Press, 2009) and the chapbook Lincoln (2014). Her work is included in the 100 Best African American Poems edited by Nikki Giovanni, Best Monologues from Best American Short Plays 2013, and Ping Pong Magazine.

Wednesday Reading Series

Aaron Kunin is the author of Cold Genius (Fence, 2014) and four other books of poetry and prose. He lives in California.

Charles North is the author of ten books of poems, most recently What It Is Like: New and Selected Poems (2011) and Complete Lineups (2009). The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight (2001) was a finalist for the inaugural Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award. He has published a collection of essays on poets, artists and critics, No Other Way (1998), and collaborative works with artists and other poets, including Translation (2014) with Paula North.

Svetlana Kitto is a writer, teacher and oral historian. Her fiction, articles and interviews have been featured in Salon, VICE, Art21, Plenitude Magazine, OutHistory, Surface, Queen Mobs Teahouse and the New York Observer among other publications, and the books Occupy (Verso, 2012) and the Who, the What and the When (Chronicle, 2014). She has contributed oral histories to projects and exhibitions at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design and the gallery Know More Games. She co-curates the reading and performance series Adult Contemporary in NYC. Currently, she is at work on a novel called Purvs, which means “swamp” in Latvian, and is the name of that country’s first gay club.

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Her other honors include the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Third Coast and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation.

Elaine Kahn is an artist, performer and poet. She is a founding member of the P.Splash Collective and the author of Women in Public (City Lights, 2015).

Édgar J. Ulloa is a transdisciplinary artist and post-transborder poet from Ciudad Juárez, México. He maintains a blog (mijuaritos.wordpress.com) of aural, visual, virtual and performance poetry, that serves as a border trauma and memory reflection of his native city when it was one of the most dangerous in the world according to the media. In his work, he emerges as an explorer, producer of the aesthetic-historical, word-sign, word-symbol. He feels compelled to speak out through poetic performance action. His performances negotiate imperialist border politics, cultural memory, trauma and violence in addition to instigating audience and public participation. Ulloa earned his undergraduate degree in Language and Literature in Texas, and his master’s degree in Creative Writing in New York City.

Monday Reading Series

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher, Cave Canem Fellow, and Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Tupelo Quarterly, Winter Tangerine, The African American Review, Vinyl, Muzzle, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2014, she was the winner of The Feminist Wire’s inaugural poetry contest judged by Evie Shockley. She is currently a 2015 Center for Fiction Fellow and the winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, how to get over is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, but hangs out digitally at: shesaidword.com.

NYC-based poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray is the author of Shorthand and Electric Language Stars and I Thought You Said It Was Sound/How Does That Sound? (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs 2015, 2012); Place your orders now! (Belladonna*, 2014); A Country Road Going Back in Your Direction (Argos Books, 2015); and Heart Stoner Bingo (Straw Gate Books, 2007). Her super 8 films have screened internationally and she often reads live with her films. Shorthand and Electric Language Stars was selected as a finalist for a 2016 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry.

Wednesday Reading Series

Maureen Owen is the author of Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her title American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. Her newest title Edges of Water is available from Chax Press.

Karen Weiser is the author of To Light Out (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) and the soon to be released Or, The Ambiguities (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), a collection of long poems in correspondence with various books by Herman Melville.

Monday Reading Series

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. His first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is an associate professor in English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta.

Montana Ray is a feminist poet, translator, and scholar. The author of 5 chapbooks and artist books, her first full length collection of poetry, (guns & butter), is available from Argos Books. She’s also a PhD student in comparative literature at Columbia University & the mom of Pokémon enthusiast, Amadeus.

Monday Reading Series

Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford is a poet, video artist, and game designer living in Brooklyn, NY.

Orlando White is the author of two books of poetry: Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009) and LETTERRS (Nightboat Books, 2015). He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Brown University. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Omnidawn Poetry Feature Blog, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, American Indian Culture And Research Journal, Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Residency and a Bread Loaf John Ciardi Fellowship. He teaches at Diné College and in the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Monday Reading Series

There’s nothing worse than funny poems but often people laugh in poetry readings and you don’t know when it’s going to happen & that’s what’s truly live about it. They may not ever laugh at that same moment in your poem again. So what was it. And what’s the interim between the poems called when the poet does patter and drinks water and looks weird or calm and if you’re some poets deadhead you learn that they shamelessly do that patter again and again. What if the poem never came, if the poet got up there and kept pattering. Would the meaning of the word ‘poetry’ stand or would it be something else, a clown or a sensai looking for a laugh or a tear or an extended or occasional huh. A room of all silence. I’m pondering that. Bring your stupid mind & your broken heart. I’m making my bid.

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1949, was educated in Catholic schools, graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Boston in 1971, and moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. She gave her first reading at CBGB’s, and then gravitated to St. Mark’s church where she studied with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Bill Zavatsky. She has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and fiction including Not Me (1991), Chelsea Girls (1994), Cool for You (2000), and Skies (2001). Recent books include Sorry, Tree (2007), The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009), and Inferno: a poet’s novel (2010). Her new selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice, will be published this September by Ecco/Harper Collins.