Radical Poetry Reading with Urayoán Noel

Urayoán Noel is a Puerto Rican poet, performer, translator, and critic living in the Bronx. He has published seven books of poetry and the prize-winning study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, and he has been a finalist for the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award for his translations of Latin American poetry. Noel teaches at New York University and at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is a writer, vocalist and performance/sound artist and is the author of TwERK. Diggs has presented and performed at California Institute of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, MoMA, and Walker Art Center and at numerous festivals. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, Diggs has presented events for BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, El Museo del Barrio, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, and the David Rubenstein Atrium. Diggs has received a 2020 C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a Whiting Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, as well as grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, NYFA, and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, among others.

Poet, editor, educator and former candidate for New York State Assembly, Joey De Jesus is the author of HOAX (forthcoming Operating System), and chapbooks: We Animate the Dream: A Poet’s Run for Public Office (Mount Analog Political Pamphlet Series II, 2021) and NOCT- The Threshold of Madness (The Atlas Review, 2019). Joey received the 2019-20 BRIC ArtFP Project Room Commission and 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry for HOAX. Poems have appeared in Poem-A-Day, Artists Space, Barrow Street, Bettering American Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Museum and elsewhere. Joey is a co-editor at Apogee Journal and sits on the advisory board of No, Dear Magazine. Joey lives in Ridgewood where they ran a socialist, abolitionist campaign for New York State Assembly District 38.

Queer Afro-Caribbean mother, poet, writer, performer, cultural worker, and educator, Yara Liceaga-Rojas was born in Puerto Rico and currently resides in Cambridge, MA. Her projects revolve around origin, gender, race, class, longing, loss, affective labor, and the visibility of marginalized subjects. She is the author of five books of poetry including Hacernos el adiós (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña 2019) and Acentos espesos/Thick Accents (Taller Mujer Orquesta 2018, recipient of the New England Foundation for the Arts’ Creative City 2018 grant). She is the cofounder, curator, and coordinator of the multidisciplinary artist performance series Poetry is Busy.

Interdisciplinary artist, poet and scholar Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh 2008), Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books 2009), Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015), and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018). Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures (Wendy’s Subway, 2021) and Virgil Kills: Stories (Nightboat Books, 2022) are forthcoming. Wilson is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Kundiman, MacDowell, the Center for Art and Thought, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at UC Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and principal faculty of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.