The New Social Environment#136

Radical Poetry Reading with Erica Hunt

Featuring political poetry read by Samiya Bashir, Mihee Kim, Jena Osman, Dior Stephens, and Yanyi.

 

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

Poet Erica Hunt curates the sixth installment of Radical Poetry Readings, featuring Samiya Bashir, Mihee Kim, Jena Osman, Dior Stephens, and Yanyi.

In this talk

Erica Hunt

A photograph of poet Erica Hunt, smiling outdoors in a blue shirt.
Photo by Erika Kapin
Erice Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of six books of poetry. In October her latest book, Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems will be published by Nightboat Books. With Dawn Lundy Martin, she is co-editor of Letters to the Future: Radical Writing by Black Women from Kore Press.

Samiya Bashir

A sepia photograph of poet Samiya Bashir sitting on a long outdoor bench and smiling.
Nina Johnson Photography
Samiya Bashir’s books of poetry: Field Theories, Gospel, and Where the Apple Falls, and anthologies, including Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, exist. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with a magic cat who shares her obsession with trees and blackbirds and occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.

Mihee Kim

A photograph of poet Mihee Kim in the shadows of leaves.
Courtesy Mihee Kim
Mihee Kim (she/they) is an artist, poet, and Managing Director of Kearny Street Workshop, a longstanding Asian Pacific American arts nonprofit based in San Francisco. She earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley and is an MFA candidate at California College of the Arts. She lives, organizes, and creates on Chochenyo Ohlone land, also known as beloved Oakland, California.

Jena Osman

A photograph of poet Jena Osman, sitting at a desk with open books.
Courtesy Jena Osman.
Jena Osman’s books of poems include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse), Corporate Relations (Burning Deck), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press), The Network (Fence Books, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books) and The Character (Beacon Press). She edited the literary magazine Chain with Juliana Spahr. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Dior J. Stephens (a.k.a. Dolphin) is a writer, performer, and pure pisces hailing from the cloudy waters of Cleveland, OH. In 2015 Dior earned a B.A. in Theater Acting from Columbia College Chicago. Dior is currently based in Oakland, CA where he is pursuing a dual MFA/MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) and Visual & Critical Studies.

Yanyi

A photograph of poet Yanyi standing in front of blue sky and rooftops.
HK Goldstein
Yanyi is a writer and critic. He is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World Random House, forthcoming 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry, and named one of 2019’s Best Poetry Books by New York Public Library. His work has been featured in NPR’s All Things Considered, Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, and he is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. Currently, he is poetry editor at Foundry and giving creative advice at The Reading.

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