Radical Poetry Reading with Bernardo Wade

Writer and artist Bernardo Wade is from New Orleans, LA. He tries at poems & rides his bike around Bloomington, IN, because IU funds his present period of studying with others. He is a Watering Hole Fellow. He also moonlights as an equity and justice advocate. He has work published or forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, Southern Humanities Review, Salt Hill Journal, Knight’s Library Magazine, and others. He is Associate Editor of the Indiana Review.

Poet Ross Gay is the author of Against Which (CavanKerry Press 2006), Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press 2011), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press 2015), the winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award—and most recently the book-length poem Be Holding: A Poem (University of Pittsburgh Press 2020). Alongside Aimee Nezhukumatathil, he co-authored the chapbook Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (Organic Weapon Arts 2014). His collection of essays The Book of Delights was released by Algonquin Books in 2019. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Bread Loaf, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Gay teaches at Indiana University.

Dominican American poet and educator Diannely Antigua was born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. She is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

Poet Taylor Johnson is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work appears in the Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem Fellow, a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and a recipient of the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. They are from Washington, DC.

Poet El Williams III is a St. Louis native. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ploughshares, River Styx, Shenandoah, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem, Community of Writers, Tin House, and the Watering Hole. Currently, he is a dual MFA/MA candidate in poetry and African American & African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. He is an Associate Instructor and previously served as the Creative Nonfiction Editor for Indiana Review.