EventsThe New Social Environment#136

Radical Poetry Reading with Erica Hunt

Featuring political poetry read by Samiya Bashir, Mihee Kim, Jena Osman, Dior Stephens, and Yanyi.

Wednesday, September 23, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Poet Erica Hunt curates the sixth installment of Radical Poetry Readings, featuring Samiya Bashir, Mihee Kim, Jena Osman, Dior Stephens, and Yanyi.

In this Talk

Erica Hunt

A photo of Erica Hunt on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Photo by Erika Kapin
Poet and scholar Erica Hunt is the author of numerous publications including VERONICA: A Suite in X Parts (selva oscura press, 2019) and Jump the Clock (Nightboat, 2020), a collection spanning from the 1980s to the present. With Dawn Lundy Martin, she is co-editor of Letters to the Future: Radical Writing by Black Women from Kore Press. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/the University of Capetown Program in Public Policy.

    Samiya Bashir

    A photo of Samiya Bashir on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Nina Johnson Photography
    Samiya Bashir’s books of poetry: Field Theories, Gospel, and Where the Apple Falls, and anthologies, including Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art, exist. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. She lives in Portland, Ore, with a magic cat who shares her obsession with trees and blackbirds and occasionally crashes her classes and poetry salons at Reed College.

    Mihee Kim

    A photo of Mihee Kim on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Courtesy Mihee Kim
    Mihee Kim (she/they) is an artist, poet, and Managing Director of Kearny Street Workshop, a longstanding Asian Pacific American arts nonprofit based in San Francisco. She earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley and is an MFA candidate at California College of the Arts. She lives, organizes, and creates on Chochenyo Ohlone land, also known as beloved Oakland, California.

      Jena Osman

      A photo of Jena Osman on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      Courtesy Jena Osman.
      Jena Osman’s books of poems include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Corporate Relations (Burning Deck, 2014), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). Osman was a 2006 Pew Fellow in the Arts, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Howard Foundation, and the Fund for Poetry. She founded and edited the award-winning literary magazine Chain with Juliana Spahr. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at Temple University in Philadelphia.

      Yanyi

      A photo of Yanyi on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
      HK Goldstein
      Yanyi is a writer and critic. He is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World Random House, forthcoming 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry, and named one of 2019’s Best Poetry Books by New York Public Library. His work has been featured in NPR’s All Things Considered, Tin House, Granta, and A Public Space, and he is the recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House. Currently, he is poetry editor at Foundry and giving creative advice at The Reading.

      We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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