Radical Poetry Reading with Angela Narciso Torres

Poet Angela Narciso Torres is the author of What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books, 2021), To the Bone (Sundress Publications, 2020), and Blood Orange (Willow Books, 2013). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, and Prairie Schooner. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, she received First Prize in the Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York). She serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO Poetry. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in San Diego.

Poet Nan Cohen is the author of two collections, Rope Bridge (Cherry Grove Collections, 2005) and Unfinished City (Gunpowder Press, 2017) winner of the Michael Dryden Award, as well as the chapbook Thousand-Year-Old Words (Glass Lyre Press, October 2021). Recent poems and prose appear in Electric Literature’s The Commuter, The Cortland Review, The Curator, The Inflectionist Review, DMQ Review, JAMA, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Northwest, and SWWIM Every Day. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and an NEA Literature Fellowship, Nan lives in Los Angeles and co-directs the poetry programs of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

Poet and editor Ralph Hamilton was editor of RHINO for fourteen years and is still consulting editor and board chair. A former judge of Fifth Wednesday Journal’s poetry prize, he also served as a guest poetry editor. In 2021, he was judge for The Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters poetry prize. Ralph co-edited the debut poetry volume of Glass Lyre Press’s Aeolian Harp Anthology. His poems have appeared in Court Green, CutBank, Blackbird, The Ilanot Review, and elsewhere. His book of poems Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail (SRP, 2015) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Poet and linguist Karen Llagas is the author of the collection Archipelago Dust (Meritage Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Rhino Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, the anthologies Troubling Borders, An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2014), The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010), Field of Mirrors, (PAWA, 2010), and others. Her research interests include myths and folklore in contemporary Filipino and Filipino-American literature; as well as heritage language teaching within the framework of critical pedagogy. She’s currently at work on a Tagalog verb book and her second collection of poems.

Poet, author, and essayist Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route, forthcoming from Alice James Books, January 2022) as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines, selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design (Alice James Books, 2013 and 2016). A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. He is now a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.