Radical Poetry Reading with Malcolm Tariq

Poet and playwright Malcolm Tariq is the author of Heed the Hollow (Graywolf Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2019 George Author of the Year Award, and Extended Play (2017). A graduate of Emory University, Tariq has a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is the Programs and Communications Manager at Cave Canem, a home for Black Poetry.

Poet Mary Moore Easter is the author of Free Papers: poems inspired by the testimony of Eliza Winston, a Mississippi slave escaped to freedom in Minnesota in 1860 (Finishing Line Press 2021), which charts Easter’s personal ancestry beside what’s known of Eliza Winston. Eastern is the author of three other books of poetry: The Body of the World (Minnesota Book Award in Poetry Finalist 2019), Walking from Origins (Heywood Press 1993) and From the Flutes of Our Bones (Nodin Press 2020). Her poems have been widely published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Christian Century, Water~Stone, SoFloPoJo, and several anthologies. Easter founded and directed Carleton College’s dance program, and is a Cave Canem fellow.

Poet Yolanda J. Franklin is the author of Blood Vinyls (Anhinga Press 2018) which Roxane Gay calls ‘a must-must-must read.’ A four-time Fulbright Scholar Award Finalist, Franklin is also a Cave Canem, Callaloo, and VONA Fellow. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Frontier Magazine, Sugar House Review, Southern Humanities Review, and The Langston Hughes Review. Her poetry also appears in the anthology It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip Hop (Minor Arcana Press 2017). She is a two-time recipient of the J.M. Shaw Academy of American Poets Award. Franklin is a proud third-generation Floridian.

Writer from Charleston, Kwoya Fagin Maples is the author of Mend (University Press of Kentucky 2018), a finalist for the 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Housatonic Book Award for Poetry, which tells the story of the birth of obstetrics and gynecology in America and the role enslaved Black women played in that process. She is the author of the chapbook Something of Yours (Finishing Line Press 2010), holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Her work appears in several journals and anthologies, and she teaches in the MFA program for Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, home of the Black Warrior Review.

Writer and visual artist Courtney Faye Taylor is the winner of the 92Y Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize and the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2020, Joy and Hope and All That: A Tribute to Lucille Clifton, and featured in The Nation, Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Courtney is the Poetry Editor of SLICE Magazine and a studio resident at the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City. She is working on her first collection of poetry.