Radical Poetry Reading with Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

Multidisciplinary writer and artist Stephanie Adams-Santos’s work is rooted in the crossroads of ritual, ancestry, and environment—with a penchant for the weird, queer, and surreal. She is the author of several collections of poetry: Dream of Xibalba (forthcoming 2021, winner of the Orison Books Poetry Prize), Swarm Queen’s Crown (finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards), and The Sundering (winner of a New York Chapbook Fellowship by Poetry Society of America). Stephanie’s poems and prose have appeared in Orion Magazine, The Boston Review, Guernica, the anthology Speculative Fiction for Dreamers, among others. She is a 2022 Ojalá Ignition Fellow and is also a professional Tarot reader and occasional instructor of poetry and divination.

Described as a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion,” Samiya Bashir is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes light. In 2002 she was a co-founder of Fire & Ink, an advocacy organization and writer’s festival for LGBT writers of African descent with whom she worked through 2015. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry.

Poet Shayla Lawson is the author of This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, Being Dope, I Think I’m Ready To See Frank Ocean, A Speed Education in Human Being, and PANTONE. She has appeared on OPB with Tiffany Camhi, NPR’s Live Wire Radio broadcast, The Special Report with Areva Martin, Salon Talks with D. Watkins, The True Romance Podcast, at The Center for Fiction with 2 Dope Queens’ Phoebe Robinson, Storybound by LitHub, at The Strand with Ashley C. Ford, Memoir Monday, and the Tanz Im August Art Festival in Berlin. She is a columnist at Bustle magazine and has written for ESPN, Guernica, Vulture, New York, and The Cut. Shayla is a MacDowell and Yaddo Artist Colony Fellow, and a National Book Critics Circle Finalist.

Poet Coleman Stevenson is the author of three collections of poems, Light Sleeper (2020), Breakfast (2015), and The Accidental Rarefication of Pattern #5609 (2012), several books about the Tarot including The Dark Exact Tarot Guide, and a book of essays on creativity accompanying the card game Metaphysik. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications such as Seattle Review, Mid-American Review, Louisiana Literature, tarot.com, and the anthology Motionless from the Iron Bridge. In addition to her work as a designer of tarot and oracle decks through her company The Dark Exact, her fine art work, exhibited in galleries around the Pacific Northwest, focuses on the intersections between image and text.