Radical Poetry Reading with Arisa White

Author of Honeyfish and Difficult Fruit and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry Lauren K. Alleyne’s award-winning work appears in venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, Tin House and Ms Muse, among others. She is a professor of English and Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University.

American poet, essayist, and digital curator from Detroit, Aricka Foreman is the author of the chapbook Dream with a Glass Chamber, and Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books), she has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared in RHINO, Buzzfeed, James Franco Review, THRUSH, and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press) among others. She lives in Chicago, IL.

Author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020) Joy Priest is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, as well as the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Atlantic, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated. Her work has been anthologized in Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South, and Best New Poets 2014, 2016 and 2019. Joy is currently editing an anthology of Louisville poets, forthcoming from Sarabande Books.

Award-winning poet, artist, educator, public speaker, and event producer Imani Tolliver is an interdisciplinary artist, collagist, and watercolorist. A graduate of Howard University, a Cave Canem Fellow, and Imani served as Poet Laureate for the Watts Towers Arts Center. She has also been recognized by the City of Los Angeles for her work as a promoter, host, and publicist in support of the literary arts in Southern California. Rooted in social justice, Imani has curated and produced a wide portfolio of arts and cultural programming that celebrate, reflect, and amplify the voices of diverse communities.

A Cave Canem fellow and an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. She is the co-editor of the anthology Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart and co-author of the middle-grade biography Biddy Mason Speaks Up, winner of the 2020 Maine Literary Award for Young People’s Literature and the Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle-Grade Nonfiction. Published by Augury Books, Who’s Your Daddy is Arisa’s recently released poetic memoir, which poet Patricia Smith says “unreels like heart-wrenching fragments of film.” She serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press and is a community advisory board member for MWPA.