Neon Desire

Join us for an evening of poetry and music in the Bedford library courtyard. 

 

andriniki mattis was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, Poets House, and The Poetry Project. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths University of London and a B.A. in Political and Poetic Resistance from Brooklyn College. His writing has appeared in wildness, Indiana Review, Wasifiri, Montez Press, and elsewhere. He is the author of Quiet Fires (Anamot Press 2023) and the chaplet Living Btwn the Lines (Belladonna* Press 2018).

Lomar Brown (alias – Kris Keef) is a Brooklyn based saxophonist. Brown has been making music from an early age; piano and saxophone. He continued to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston Massachusetts. After graduating he taught at the Epiphany School while writing his own music. Brown mainly plays alto and can be found on numerous projects, including the album The Beacon by AllBe in 2015. As part of Alissia and the Funketeers he performed at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy. In 2020 he was part of the band of Moses Sumney, performing at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Brown is currently working on his own compositions in Brooklyn and Amsterdam. He performs weekly with his band at Bijan’s in downtown Brooklyn.

Tangie Mitchell is a poet, editor, and collage artist. 
Born and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, her work centers personal and collective histories of the Black American South, among other subjects. Tangie earned a Bachelors in Political Science from Spelman College and an MFA in Writing (Poetry) from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been featured in Poetry Wales, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, West Trade Review, Berlin Lit, Exposition Review, and more. Tangie lives in Brooklyn with a growing collection of 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s funk/r&b/soul memorabilia.

Nikki Kramer lives in bed stuy Brooklyn. She has lived in Brooklyn for most of her life. She tends to gain a lot of inspiration from observing the ordinary street carnival and the ceaseless treadmill of human life around her. She mainly writes creative nonfiction, poetic prose, vignettes and short lyrical fiction. Her work has been influenced most by Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Maggie Nelson and Anne Carson. She usually writes about time, space, dreams, travel experiences, characters in her environment and inner workings of the mind. She has self-published some image-text zines and also loves to host events, which are usually poetry and music extravaganzas.