Poets

Photo by Lisa Jarrett

Prageeta Sharma

Prageeta Sharma is the author of four poetry collections: Bliss to Fill, The Opening Question, Infamous Landscapes and Undergloom. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at University of Montana and is co-director of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing, held at University of Montana in April 2014 and March 2015.

Cristina Rivera-Garza

Cristina Rivera-Garza is the award-winning author of six novels, three collections of short stories, five collections of poetry and three non-fiction books. She has translated, from English into Spanish, Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman; and, from Spanish into English, “Nine Mexican Poets edited by Cristina Rivera Garza,” in New American Writing 31.

Bridget Talone

Bridget Talone is the author of The Soft Life and lives in Philadelphia. Recent work has appeared in A Perfect Vacuum, Pouch Mag, and Elderly.

Angel Nafis

Angel Nafis is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Rattling Wall, Union Station Magazine, MUZZLE Magazine, Mosaic Magazine, and Poetry Magazine. She has represented the LouderArts Poetry Project at both the National Poetry Slam and the Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2011. She is an Urban Word NYC Mentor and the founder, curator, and host of the quarterly Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon reading series. She is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems across the United States and Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.

Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and emerging visual artist. She is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works and a chaplet, “Gift” by Belladonna. 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 has appeared in Art Forum, The Huffington Post and Hyperallergic. In 2017, she was a Visiting Critic at Yale and Columbia University. She is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts for 2017/18. She is online faculty at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC in the MFA summer low-res program for 3 consecutive years. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, NYU and Pratt Universities, Smack Mellon Gallery, The High Line, Performa, Danspace, The Bessies, Performance Space, Joe’s Pub, The Public Theater, SMFA, BRIC and was an artist- in- residence at Pratt University, Denniston Hill and Poet-Linc, Lincoln Center Education. She has toured internationally. She directed a final showcase at Lincoln Center Atrium. Her collage work appeared in Avram Finklestein’s FOUND at The Leslie Lohman Museum in 2017. She has created cover collage work for an upcoming Issue of Sinister Wisdom, (2018) Legacies of Resistance, “Dump Trump.” She has received a Monica Hand, July 2018 scholarship for the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni’s, “The 100 Best African American Poems.” Her short story book Sweet Dreams was published by Belladonna in April 2018. Visit http://www.belladonnaseries.org/sweet-dreams/

Photo Credit: Diana Yanez

Janice A. Lowe

A multi-disciplinary composer, poet and pianist, Janice A. Lowe is the author of LEAVING CLE poems of nomadic dispersal and the chapbook SWAM. Her musical theater compositions include Lil Budda, text by Stephanie L. Jones, Sit-In at the Five & Dime, libretto by Marjorie Duffield and Millie and Christine McKoy Sisters’ Syncopated Sonnets in Song, text by Tyehimba Jess. Her multi-media work Desegregation Remix: 3 Women Sing the Borders is a collaboration with Lee Ann Brown. She teaches multi-media composition at Rutgers University, has taught in Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program and performs with her band NAMAROON. She has composed and recorded with several experimental bands including: w/o a net, Digital Diaspora and HAGL. She is a co-founder of the Dark Room Collective. Lowe was a recent Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania. She is a longtime music director at White Bird Productions’ Summer Musical Theater Program.

Watercolor by K.B. Jones

Karen Weiser

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.

Maureen Owen

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.

Michael Leong

Michael Leong is the author of e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012). He has also published numerous chapbooks, most recently Li Po Meets Oulipo (Belladonna*, 2015) andFruits and Flowers and Animals and Seas and Lands Do Open (Burnside Review Press, 2015).

Cassandra Troyan

Cassandra Troyan is the author of THRONE OF BLOOD (Solar Luxuriance, 2013), BLACKEN ME BLACKEN ME, GROWLED (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2014), KILL MANUAL (Artifice Books, 2014) and the chapbook HATRED OF WOMEN (Solar Luxuriance, 2014). Forthcoming in 2016 is a chapbook from Kenning Editions’ Ordinance series, entitled FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION. They live in the bay.

Daniel Borzutzky

Daniel Borzutzky’s books and chapbooks include, among others, The Performance of Becoming Human (2016); In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Memories of my Over Development (2015); Bedtime Stories For The End of the World! (2015), Data Bodies (2013), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007).