A reading to raise funds for RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization, featuring Aziza Barnes, Emily Brandt, Thomas Dooley, Camonghne Felix, Lizzie Harris, Venessa Marco, David McLoghlin and Paul Tran.
Donate to RAINN here: https://fundraise.rainn.org/PoetsAgainstSexualViolence
Aziza Barnes is blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi. You can find her work currently or forthcoming in PANK, pluck!, Muzzle, Callaloo, Union Station, Phantom Limb, The Rumpus, The Offing, and The Breakbeat Poets, among other journals and collections. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the Exploding Pinecone Prize and published by Button Poetry. Her first full length collection of poems, I BE, BUT I AIN'T (2016), is the winner of the 2015 Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books.
Emily Brandt is the author of three poetry chapbooks. Emily is a co-founding editor of No, Dear and Web Acquisitions Editor for VIDA. For many years, she directed Take Back The News, an organization that confronted the under- and mis-representation of sexual assault by mainstream media.
Thomas Dooley is the author of Trespass, a winner of the National Poetry Series. His poetry, collaborations, and interviews have appeared on NPR, Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, and “PBS NewsHour.” A practitioner of narrative medicine, Thomas works at the bedsides of hospitalized teens and has presented internationally on the subject of pediatric illness narratives. He is the Artistic Director of Emotive Fruition, a New York-based collective of poets and actors that works to change the way artists and audiences engage with live poetry. A member of the creative writing faculty at New York University, Thomas lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Camonghne Felix is a poet, political speechwriter and essayist. She is an MA Candidate in Arts Politics at NYU, a 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee, and the 2013 recipient of the Cora Craig Award for Young Women. You can find her work in various spaces, including Youtube, and in publications like Apogee, Union Station, and Poetry Magazine. She is also the author of the chapbook Yolk, published via Penmanship Books in March 2015 and in May of that year was listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl From the Future You Should Know.”
Lizzie Harris’s debut collection, Stop Wanting (CSU Poetry Center, 2014), was selected by Tracy K. Smith and named one of Cosmo’s “10 Books by Women You Have to Read This Spring.” Her poems appear in All Hollow, Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Phantom Limb, Sixth Finch and VICE.com. She was born in southern Arizona, raised in Pennsylvania and currently resides in Brooklyn, where she’s a poetry editor for Bodega Magazine.
Venessa Marco is an Afro-descendent writer by way of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Marco has been featured on the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Upworthy and The Feminist Wire. She was allocated the Cora Craig Author Award for young women writers and her book is forthcoming in Penmanship Books.
David McLoghlin's The middle section of Brendan, “Digesting a Scorpion,” addresses experiences of disassociation and silencing resulting from clerical sexual abuse—and exhorts us to “hold the line” in the fight against erasure. The manuscript for his third collection, Crash Centre, continues and extends that concern.
Paul Tran is a Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net-nominated poet. Their work appears in Prairie Schooner, MTV, RHINO, which gave them an Editor's Award, & elsewhere. They received fellowships & residencies from Kundiman, VONA, Poets House, Lambda Literary, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Home School Miami, Vermont Studio Center, The Conversation, & Palm Beach Poetry Festival. They are the first Asian American in 19 years to represent the Nuyorican Poets Cafe at the National Poetry Slam & Individual World Poetry Slam, where they placed Top 10. Paul lives in Brooklyn, where they serve as Poetry Editor at The Offing and Poet In Residence at Urban Word NYC.