Join us for the second evening of poetry festival readings on Saturday, October 30th, 2021 at 7:00pm Central with features Kaveh Bassiri, Emily Rose Cole, Brody Parrish Craig, Jordan E. Franklin, and Khalisa Rae, with an opening mini-feature by David Donna.
The reading will take place virtually via Zoom with Zoom auto captions, and an ASL interpreter will be present. CART service will also be provided. Access copies of all poems will be provided via Google Docs.
Register for the virtual reading by clicking on the “Registration” button on the Eventbrite page, donating any amount you can, and entering the required fields. You will receive an email with the Zoom information.
Suggested donation of $5.
Every donation to Open Mouth Literary Center supports our programming, ASL interpreters, and feature poets. Become a monthly patron on Patreon or make a one-time donation at our PayPal or to our GoFundMe campaign.
Recommended for attendees 16 years and above.
This event will also be simultaneously live-streamed to our YouTube channel.
FEATURED READERS:
Kaveh Bassiri is an Iranian-American writer and translator. He is the author of two chapbooks: 99 Names of Exile (2019), winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and Elementary English (2020), winner of Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. His poetry has been published in the Best American Poetry 2020, Best New Poets 2020, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, and Shenandoah. He is also the recipient of a 2019 translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship from Arkansas Arts Council, and 2021-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellowship. His translations have appeared in The Common, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Los Angeles Review, and The Massachusetts Review.
Emily Rose Cole is the author of Thunderhead, a collection forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press, and Love & a Loaded Gun, a chapbook of persona poems in women’s voices from Minerva Rising Press. She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Orison Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Best New Poets 2018, Poet Lore, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati.
Brody Parrish Craig is the author of Boyish (Omnidawn Publishing, 2021), the winner of the 2019 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook contest. They are the editor of Twang, an anthology of TGNC+ creatives from the south/midwest, which was awarded a 2018 Artists 360 Practicing Artist grant. Their poetry may be found online at Crab Fat Magazine, Hobart andTypo, amongst other places. Their first full length poetry collection will be published with Omnidawn in Fall 2024.
Jordan E. Franklin is a poet from Brooklyn, NY. An alumna of Brooklyn College, she earned her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton where she served as a Turner Fellow. Her work has appeared in the Southampton Review, Breadcrumbs, easy paradise, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize offered by the North American Review, and a finalist of both the 2018 Nightjar Review Poetry Contest, and the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, when the signals come home, was selected as the winner of the 2020 Gatewood Prize and was published by Switchback Books in March 2021. Her poetry chapbook, boys in the electric age, was published by Tolsun Books in August 2021.
Khalisa Rae is an award-winning poet, activist, and journalist based in Durham, NC. She is the Gen Z Culture Editor at Blavity News and the author of debut collection- Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat from Red Hen Press 2021. Her articles appear in Vogue, Autostraddle, Catapult, LitHub, Bitch Media, NBC-BLK, and others. Her power-packed poetry in Electric Lit, Pinch, Tishman Review, Frontier Poetry, Rust & Moth, PANK, HOBART, among countless others. Currently, she serves as Asst. Editor of Glass Poetry, co-founder of Think in Ink and the Women of Color Speak reading series. Her second collection, Unlearning Eden is forthcoming from White Stag Publishing in 2022.
OPENING MINI-FEATURE
David Donna’s poems have appeared in Radar Poetry, The Shore, Ibbetson Street, and elsewhere. They live in Massachusetts, where they write code and poetry by turns.