Radical Poetry Reading with JoAnne McFarland

Artist, poet, and curator JoAnne McFarland is the Artistic Director of Artpoetica Project Space in Gowanus, Brooklyn which focuses on work that is both literary and highly visual. McFarland has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, for more than thirty years. Her artwork is in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Department of State, and Dynegy, Inc., among many others. She is the author of eighteen poetry books and libretti, including a recent series of innovative digital bookworks. In her work McFarland treats violence and creativity as diametrically opposed: each act of making thwarts violence’s aim to destroy.

Poet Karren LaLonde Alenier is the author of eight poetry collections. Her latest how we hold on was published by Broadstone Books in April 2021. Her collection Looking for Divine Transportation (The Bunny & Crocodile Press 1999) won the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature. Her jazz opera with composer Bill Banfield Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On premiered in New York in a production at Encompass New Opera Theatre in June 2005. She is currently at work on a set of three books promoting Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. She promotes other people’s poetry through public programming and book publication at The Word Works.

Poet E.J. Antonio is the author of two chapbooks: Every Child Knows (Premiere Poets Chapbook Series 2007) and Solstice (Red Glass Books 2013). She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and Cave Canem. Her work has appeared in the Encyclopedia Project, African Voices Literary Magazine, Black Renaissance Noire, The Mom Egg, and Killens Review of Arts & Letters. She has appeared as a featured reader and performer at venues such as Why Not Jazz Room, Arts Westchester, the Hobart Festival of Women Writers, and Langston Hughes House. E.J. is a founding member of the Jazz & Poetry Choir Collective and she is a founding board member of the arts nonprofit One Breath Rising.

Poet Meg Kearney is the author of All Morning the Crows, winner of the Washington Prize for Poetry, which was published by The Word Works in April 2021. She is also the author of An Unkindness of Ravens (BOA Editions 2001) and Home By Now (Four Way Books 2009), winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award, a heroic crown/chapbook The Ice Storm (Green Linden Press 2020) and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book Trouper (Scholastic Press 2013) is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Kearney’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s A Writer’s Almanac and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts.