National Black Writers Conference Poetry Cafe
As part of the National Black Writers Conference, the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College presents a poetry cafe featuring three amazing poets: Reginald Harris, Linda Susan Jackson and Anastacia-Renee. Poets from Medgar Evers will respond to poetry from works by these Cave Canem poets. The reading will present a "call and response" rendering of original poems from Cave Canem poets and the counter response to the work by Medgar Evers student poets.
Participants
Born in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised in Baltimore, Reginald Harris won the 2012 Cave Canem / Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for Autogeography. His first book, 10 Tongues, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His fiction, reviews, and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals, and websites, including African-American Review, Sou'wester, Of Poetry and Protest: Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, and This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets. He and his partner live in Brooklyn. (Instagram: @reginald.harris)
Anastacia-Reneé is an award-winning cross-genre queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, TEDX speaker and former Seattle Civic Poet. She is the author of Side Notes from the Archivist, (v.), and Forget It. Her mixed media art has been exhibited at the Fry Art Museum and her installation, “Don’t Be Absurd (Alice in Parts),” was chosen by NBC as one of the “Queer Artist of Color Must See LGBTQ Arts Shows.” She has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Artist Trust, Ragdale, Mineral School and others. Renee'’s poetry, fiction and nonfiction has been anthologized and published widely. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Linda Susan Jackson is the author of Truth Be Told (Four Way Books) and What Yellow Sounds Like (Tia Chucha Press), a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Paterson Prize. She has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Calabash International Literary Festival, Soul Mountain Writers Retreat and The Frost Place. Her work has appeared in Brilliant Corners, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review, Obsidian and Ploughshares, among others, and has been featured on The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series and Poets on Poetry series. She is a retired associate professor of English from Medgar Evers College/CUNY.
