Radical Poetry Reading with Mahogany L. Browne

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer & educator. Executive Director of Bowery Poetry Club & Artistic Director of Urban Word NYC & Poetry Coordinator at St. Francis College. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby & Black Girl Magic (Macmillan), Kissing Caskets (Yes Yes Books) & Dear Twitter (Penmanship Books). She is also the founder of the Woke Baby Book Fair (a nationwide diversity literature campaign) & as an Arts for Justice grantee, is completing her first book of essays on mass incarceration, investigating its impact on women and children. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Caits Meissner is the author of the illustrated hybrid poetry book Let It Die Hungry (The Operating System, 2016). Her latest projects include the DIY comix poetry zine Pep Talks For Broke(n) People and a comix vignette series, New York Strange, publishing monthly in Hobart journal throughout 2020. She currently is the inaugural Palette Poetry Second Book Fellow and spends her days as the Prison and Justice Writing Program Director at PEN America.

Jive Poetic is a writer, organizer, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the founder of Insurgent Poets Society, Carnival Slam: Cultural Exchange, and the co-founder of the Brooklyn Poetry Slam. His work has been showcased on season four of TVONE’s Lexus Verses and Flow, PBS News Hour, and BET. In 2017 Jive was the first recipient of the John Morning Award for Art and Service. International recognition and support for his work has come from the British Arts Council; US Embassies in Australia, Brazil, and Poland; and the Minister Of Culture in Antigua and Barbuda. Currently, Jive is the Friday night poetry slam curator and host at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café. When he is not on tour, he teaches poetry and hip–hop workshops to at risk youth in New York City and the surrounding area.

Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2020 Kunitz Prize and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, APR, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, and Poets & Writers, among others. She is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Caroline Rothstein is an internationally touring and acclaimed writer, poet, and performer. Her work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, NYLON, Narratively, The ABA Journal, Williams Magazine, The Forward, Hey Alma, Radius Lit, Our Town, and elsewhere. She is on faculty for the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s annual Cornerstone Fellowship, a Youth Mentor at Urban Word NYC, and a facilitator for the Dialogue Arts Project. Caroline is a producer on the forthcoming documentary film “The Kids,” and was an Associate Producer on Andrea B. Scott’s “Florence, Arizona.” She hosted and produced the YouTube series “Body Empowerment,” and was President of the Board of Directors for Mental Fitness, Inc.

Ramya Ramana is an Indian-American poet, author, educator and songwriter. The New York native often writes about topics such as race, femininity, intergenerational trauma, faith and the first-gen experience. She received her bachelor’s at St. John’s University which she attended on a full scholarship with the NY Knicks Poetry Slam. Ramana’s upcoming projects include: creating a spoken word album, and songwriting. Ramana is currently receiving her MFA in poetry at The New School.

Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx poet and teaching artist. Gabriel has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo and a participant in the Callaloo Writers Workshops. You can find his work in publications like Winter Tangerine, The Volta, Split This Rock, VINYL, Acentos Review as well as Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017) What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019) and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020).