AWP Offsite at Studio Faro: Augury Books, Belladonna*, & Noemi

Join Augury Books, Belladonna*, & Noemi Press for an offsite AWP reading. Free and open to all. Light refreshments available & books for sale.

Readers:

T’ai Freedom Ford is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow. Her second collection, & more black, is due out from Augury Books in spring of 2019. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in the African American Review, Apogee, Bomb Magazine, Calyx, Drunken Boat, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Kweli, Obsidian, Poetry, Tin House, and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip- Hopand Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Her first collection, how to get over, won the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize, published by Red Hen Press. In 2018, she won a Face Out Emerging Writers Award from the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, where she is an editor at No, Dear Magazine.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer and Torah teacher. Her book Fruit Geode, out through Augury Books, was name a finalist in poetry for the Jewish Book Awards. Divinity School, her first book of poetry, was selected by C.D. Wright for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 2015; her poems and personal essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Tablet, and American Poetry Review. An internationally touring violinist and singer, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah, and has toured Central America and Kuwait playing fiddle music as a cultural ambassador for the US State Department. Alicia lives in Portland, OR with her partner and two children. She loves plants, ancient texts, and coffee.

Cave Canem graduate fellow Arisa White received her MFA from UMass, Amherst, and is the author of Perfect on Accident, You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened (Augury Books), Black Pearl, Post Pardon, A Penny Saved, and Hurrah’s Nest. Her poetry has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, NAACP Image Award, California Book Award, and Wheatley Book Award. The chapbook “Fishing Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won Daniel Handler’s inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. She’s the co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice series for young readers. Arisa serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press and is an assistant professor of poetry at Colby College.

Samuel Ace is a trans and genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* 2019), Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish Books, 2019), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton. He is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award, as well as a two-time finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Poetry, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches poetry and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College and divides his time between western Massachusetts and Tucson, Arizona.

Caroline Crumpacker lives in the Hudson Valley and is the Executive Director of Opus 40, Inc., a sculpture park, museum and arts center in the former quarrying country near Saugerties, New York. She is also on the editorial board of Matters of Feminist Practice, a magazine that seeks to bridge the quotidian and the theoretical in contemporary feminism, and is a member the Belladonna* Collaborative. She was a founding Poetry Editor of Fence magazine, an editor of the French/American online magazine DoubleChange, and a contributing editor for Circumference magazine. Her book Astrobolism was published by Belladonna in 2016 and she has published chapbooks including Recherche Theories (Etherdome) and The Institution in Her Twilight (Dusie Kollectiv).

Grace Ungrateful grew up in Malaysia, a postcolonial peninsula firing with desire. From there she learned rural escapism, sea breeze, migration, longing. She is the author of the chapbooks Book of Interludes (Anomalous Press, 2016) and Prop (Ahsahta Press, 2016). She is a Watering Hole fellow, and her other honors include the Lucille Clifton Poetry Fellowship from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Aspen Summer Words scholarship, resident writer at Can Serrat in Barcelona, resident at Agora Affect, and others. She holds a BA in Philosophy and MFA in Creative Writing. She is at work on a novel, and Careen is her first full-length collection of poetry.

Jessica Rae Bergamino is the author of UNMANNED, winner of Noemi Press’ 2017 Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks The Desiring Object or Voyager Two Explains to the Gathering of the Stars How She Came to Glow Among Them (Sundress Publications), The Mermaid, Singing (dancing girl press), and Blue in All Things: a Ghost Story (dancing girl publications). Individual poems have appeared in publications such as Third Coast, Black Warrior Review, The Journal, and Gulf Coast. She is a doctoral candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and lives in Seattle, WA.

Sara Borjas is a Chicana, a pocha, and a Fresno poet. She earned a B.A. in English Literature from Fresno State and an M.F.A from University of California, Riverside. She holds fellowships from CantoMundo, the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts and Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Borjas is the recipient of the 2014 Blue Mesa Poetry Prize and is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry can be found in The Rumpus, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, Ploughshares, and The Offing, amongst others. She lives in Los Angeles but stays rooted in Fresno.