Join us to celebrate Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat, 2018), a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, among many more. Hear readings by Christopher Soto, poet and editor of the anthology, and contributors Saeed Jones and Pamela Sneed, followed by a conversation and Q & A moderated by Soto. Readers will share their own work in addition to poems by contributors not present.
Saeed Jones is the author of Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press, 2014), which was the winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award For Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award. The collection was also a finalist for 2015 awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle. He is a co-host of Buzzfeed's morning show, AM to DM and his memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. He lives in New York, NY.
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, the chaplet, Gift, and the short story book Sweet Dreams. 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 received a Monica Hand, July 2018 scholarship to the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni's The 100 Best African American Poems. She is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts for 2017/18.
Christopher Soto is the author of Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016) and the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018). He cofounded the Undocupoets Campaign and worked with Amazon Literary Partnerships to establish grants for undocumented writers. His honors include The Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism by Split This Rock and the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award. He frequently writes book reviews for the Lambda Literary Foundation and is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript about police violence and mass incarceration. He received his MFA in poetry from NYU, where he was a Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshop Fellow.
Co-presented by the Poetry Society of America, The NYU Creative Writing Program, the NYU Department of English, and Nightboat Books.
Free and open to the public.
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
New York University
58 West 10th Street
New York, NY 10003
