Radical Poetry Reading with Mary Reilly

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His latest book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

An Albanian-born writer, author and translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, including Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013). Her translation from the Albanian of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space (New Directions, 2018) won an English PEN Award and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize and PEN America’s Poetry in Translation Award. Gjika teaches writing at Framingham State University and is a graduate of GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program where she was a 2019 Pauline Scheer Fellow.

Of Comanche/Southern Arapaho descent, Sy Hoahwah received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas. He has published two collections of his work: Night Cradle (USPOCO Books, 2011) and Velroy and the Madischie Mafia (West End Press, 2009). In 2013, he was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow, Jack Jung was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States. He received his BA in English from Harvard, and an MA in Korean Language and Literature from Seoul National University. His translations of Korean poet Yi Sang’s poetry and prose are published in Yi Sang: Selected Works by Wave Books. He is the American Literary Translation Association’s 2021 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program Mentor for Korean poetry. He currently teaches Korean poetry translation at Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

An Albanian poet who studied Albanian Philology & Literature at the University of Tirana and later she graduated with an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She attended The International Writing Program, University of Iowa in 1999 and was awarded a writer’s fellowship from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has worked as a journalist, TV author, university lecturer and currently as a historical researcher. She is the author of nine poetry collections in her language and fourteen other collections published in translation in other languages. Her last poetry collection Negative Space was a winner of English PEN award, shortlisted for the GRIFFIN International Poetry Prize 2019 in Canada, and a finalist for PEN America 2019.

A poet and translator living in New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Bowery Women, and Soulages: A Century; and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Beesen and LeClerc Foundations for her research on and translations of contemporary French poetry. A curator at Lévy Gorvy since 2018, Reilly heads the gallery’s poetry program, commissioning poems for the exhibition catalogues and running a reading and talk series.