We are thrilled to announce our new reading series coordinators and Poetry Project Newsletter editors for the 2017-2018 season. Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves will be joining as our Monday Night Coordinator. Mirene Arsanios and Rachel Valinsky will be co-curating the Friday Reading Series. Marwa Helal will be our new Newsletter Editor, and John Rufo will be joining her as our Reviews Editor.
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (New Yorker, b. 1980) is a Pushcart-nominated poet concerned with postcolonial ethnobotany, the limits of language, and archive as medium. Greaves has most recently been published in the collections Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing (Kore Press), and Creature/Verdure (Pinsapo Journal), as well as in her chapbook Close Reading As Forestry (Belladonna*). Publications in The Brooklyn Rail and from Ugly Duckling Presse are forthcoming. Formerly a Monday Night Reading Series curator at The Poetry Project, she will be an artist-in-residence with The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island, Florida in early 2020 and serves as Site Director of Wendy’s Subway in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015). She has contributed essays and short stories to The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Animated Reader, and The Outpost, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She holds an MA in Art Theory from Goldsmiths College and an MFA in Writing from Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace resident.
Rachel Valinsky is a writer, researcher, and translator living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, BOMB, East of Borneo, Millennium Film Journal, C Magazine, and Art21, among others. She was a curator for the Segue Reading Series in 2015 and has presented projects at Judson Memorial Church, Lisa Cooley, Spectacle Theater, and elsewhere. Rachel is a co-founder of Wendy’s Subway, a nonprofit library and writing space in Brooklyn and a contributing editor at Éditions Lutanie, Paris. She is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and currently teaches Art History at Hunter College.
Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. She has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
John Rufo has been a reviews editor for The Poetry Project Newsletter since 2017. Work has been published, or is forthcoming, on Poets [dot] org, Ploughshares, The Offing, The Capilano Review, Tagvverk, Entropy, The Journal Petra, NOO, and Dreginald. Links and contact at johnspringrufo.tumblr.com