Video recording of the event can be viewed here on the Museum’s youtube channel.
8 Queens poets will come together to create and perform an exquisite corpse poem on the theme of revelation, as well as to discuss their experiences of Queens lit and community. In partnership with Lewis Latimer House Museum in Flushing, NYC.
Viewers can access the poem through this link.
Poets: allia abdullah-matta, Moncho Alvarado, Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, Sherese Francis, Abeer Y. Hoque, Dena Igusti, Nadia Misir, and René Sing Brooks
This is an official 2023 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event.
Audience:
Adults
About the poets:
allia abdullah-matta
allia abdullah-matta (Ph.d, MFA) is a poet and Professor of English at CUNY LaGuardia. She writes about the culture, and history of Black women and explores the presence of Black bodies and voices in fine art and poetry. Her poetry has been published in Newtown Literary, Promethean, Marsh Hawk Review, Mom Egg Review Vox, Global City Review, and the Jam Journal Issue of Push/Pull. Her do-si-do double chapbook, washed clean & blues politico was published by harlequin creatures (hcx) 2021. She is working on a poetry/hybrid collection of poems and images entitled blackprint.
Moncho Alvarado
Moncho Alvarado aka @moncholapoet is a sister in residence in air, a Cihuayollotl trans Xicanx poet, translator, visual artist, and educator. She is the author of Greyhound Americans (Saturnalia Books 2022), which was the winner of the 2020 Saturnalia Book Prize, selected by Diane Seuss. She has been published in Hayden Ferry Review, Foglifter, Poets.org, and other publications. She has fellowships and residencies from LAMBDA Literary, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Troika House, and others. Alvarado is a two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and has been featured at Brooklyn Museum, Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, Time Square Arts, PEN America, to name a few. Currently, she is working on a trans historical novel in verse and lives in Queens with her partner, cuddly dog, & meowling cat. Monchoalvarado.com
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond is the author of the children’s picture book BLUE: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky, illustrated by Caldecott Honor Artist Daniel Minter. Named among the best books of 2022 by NPR, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, The Center for the Study of Multicultural Literature, and Bank Street College of Education, BLUE was honored with the 2023 NCTE Orbis Pictus Award® recognizing excellence in the writing of non-fiction for children, included on the Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List, and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Brew-Hammond also wrote the young adult novel Powder Necklace, which Publishers Weekly called “a winning debut”, and she edited RELATIONS: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices, of which Kirkus Reviews said in a STARRED review: “This smart, generous collection is a true gift.” Every month, Brew-Hammond co-leads a writing fellowship whose mission is to write light into darkness.
Sherese Francis
Sherese Francis (she/they) describes themselves as an Alkymist of the I-Magination, finding expression through poetry, interdisciplinary arts, workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology. Some of their work has been published in Furious Flower, Obsidian, Rootwork Journal, The Caribbean Writer, The Operating System, Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, and Free Verse. Additionally, Sherese has published four chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls (Three Legged Elephant, 2017), Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling (Harlequin Creature, 2018), Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight (DoubleCross Press, 2021) and Lady Liberty Smashing Stones (THRASH Press, 2022). Sherese was a finalist for the Furious Flower poetry prize ( 2020 ) and CAAPP Book Prize (2021), and won The Caribbean Writer’s Vincent Cooper Literary Prize (2021) for the poem, "SomNuh/Mbulist (Patois Possession)." Sherese also has received grant awards from Queens Council on the Arts, NYFA and NYSCA and residencies from WorksonWater, LMCC and Akademie Schloss. Besides publications, Sherese has had her(e) work featured in various exhibitions and showcases from The Lit Exhibit, NY Live Arts, Queens Public Library, York College Arts Gallery, King Manor Museum, WorksOnWater, Flushing Town Hall, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, Jamaica Flux, Baxter St Camera Club, Bliss On Bliss, Maleza Proyectos, The Rubenstein Art Center and Ely Center for Contemporary Art. For more info: https://linktr.ee/sheresefrancis
Abeer Y. Hoque
Abeer Y. Hoque is a Nigerian-born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer. She likes injera chips, funny girls, and poetry in the round. Her books include a coffee table book (The Long Way Home, 2013), a linked collection of stories, poems, and photographs (The Lovers and the Leavers, 2015), and a memoir (Olive Witch, 2017). Visit Abeer at olivewitch.com
Dena Igusti
Dena Igusti is an Indonesian Muslim writer born and raised in Queens, New York. They are the author of CUT WOMAN (Game Over Books, 2020), which has been listed as a 2020 Harvard Bookstore Staff Pick and a Entropy Mag’s Best Of 2020-2021, and I NEED THIS TO NOT SWALLOW ME ALIVE (Gingerbug Press, 2021). They are the co-playwright of the wish: a manual for a last-ditch effort to save abortion in the united states through theater, created with the support of New Georges and made possible by the Clubbed Thumb Constitution Commission, funded by Heidi Schreck and the producers of What The Constitution Means to Me, and winner of A is For. Their work has been produced and performed at LA Times, The Brooklyn Museum, The Apollo Theater, Prelude Festival (Cut Woman, 2020), Center At West Park (CON DOUGH, 2021), The Tank (First Sight 2021 at LimeFest), and several other venues internationally. They have received commissions from The Miranda Family Fund (2023), Motor Theater Company (2023), New Ohio Theatre (Now In Process 2022), Center at West Park (2021), Converse, and more.
Nadia Misir
Nadia Misir is a writer and aspiring teaching artist from South Ozone Park, Queens. Her writing has been published in Poetry, Kweli, Papercuts, Open City Magazine, No, Dear Mag, QUEENSBOUND and QC Voices. A former Asian American Writers’ Workshop Open City fellow, she received her BA in English from SUNY Oswego and an MA in American studies from Columbia University. She also holds an MFA in fiction writing from Queens College, CUNY. She has facilitated writing workshops in collaboration with Queens Museum of Art, Guardians of Flushing Bay, South Asian Feminism(s) Alliance, Queens Memory, Reimagine, Five Boro Story Project and others. Her hobbies include eavesdropping on a Lefferts Boulevard-bound A train and doodling on the Q37 bus.
René Sing Brooks
René Sing Brooks, born on the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast in 1961, is a writer, photographer, and digital filmmaker living in Jackson Heights, New York. He has written for OpenStax at Rice University in Texas, for AM NEW YORK, and for the Pulitzer Center. He is a 2020 Pulitzer Center alumnus.