Radical Poetry Reading with Rajiv Mohabir

Indo-Caribbean American poet Rajiv Mohabir is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books, 2016), Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press, 2017), and Cutlish (Four Way Books, September 2021). He is the author of a book of translations I Even Regret Night (Kaya Press, 2019) and a hybrid memoir Antiman (Restless Books, 2021). He is winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize, a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, and has received fellowships from Kundiman, The Home School, and The American Institute of Indian Studies. He holds an MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawaii. Mohabir is a professor at Emerson College.

Writer and poet Desiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’clock Press, 2016), and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Kimbilio Fiction, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Poets House, The Conversation, and Princeton in Africa. She has received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts/NYFA, and Poets & Writers. Desiree is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, New York. She lives in Providence, RI.

Writer and translator Aruni Kashyap is the author of His Father’s Disease (Context/ Westland Books India, 2019; Flipped Eye Books, UK) and translated from Assamese and introduced celebrated Indian writer Indira Goswami’s last work of fiction, The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar (Zubaan Books, 2013). He won the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, and his poetry collection There is No Good Time for Bad News (Future Cycle Press, 2021) was a finalist for the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and 2018 Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The New York Times, The Guardian, and others.

Poet Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country, forthcoming in fall 2021 from Northwestern University Press (NUP), Salvage: Poems (NUP 2017), and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket 2016). The recipient of the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, The Rumpus, PANK, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and is a 2021-2022 Amy Clampitt Resident. She is the creator of Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets based in Philadelphia, and is originally from Bali, Indonesia.