Andrea Abi-Karam and Roberto Montes Are Joining The Poetry Project Staff
The Poetry Project is pleased to announce that Andrea Abi-Karam will be joining the staff as our new Communications & Development Coordinator, and Roberto Montes will be joining as Production & Operations Coordinator.
We are so grateful and excited for them to support our expanded community outreach around Poetry Project programming, growing our media and publication platform and audience, and developing more opportunities to extend the reach of our community building through poetry beyond live events.
Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma & delayed healing. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (Commune Editions, 2016), attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Under the full Community Engagement Scholarship, Andrea received their MFA in Poetry from Mills College. With Drea Marina they co-hosted Words of Resistance [2012-2017] a monthly, radical, QTPOC open floor poetry series to fundraise for political prisoners’ commissary funds. Selected by Bhanu Kapil, Andrea’s first book is EXTRATRANSMISSION [Kelsey Street Press, 2019] a poetic critique of the U.S. military’s role in the War on Terror. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for forthcoming publication. Andrea toured with Sister Spit in 2018 and has performed at RADAR, The Poetry Project, The STUD, Basilica Soundscape, TransVisionaries, Southern Exposure, Counterpulse, Poets House, Radius for Arab-American Writers. With Kay Gabriel they are co-editing an anthology of Radical Trans Poetics forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2020. They are a leo currently obsessed with queer terror and convertibles.
Roberto Montes is the author of I DON’T KNOW DO YOU, named one of the Best Books of 2014 by NPR and a finalist for the 2014 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from The Publishing Triangle. His poetry has appeared in The Lambda Literary Spotlight, Guernica, PEN America Poetry Series, and elsewhere. A chapbook, GRIEVANCES, is now available from the Atlas Review TAR chapbook series.
