Reading

The South is a celebration of queerness. It is home to contemporary LGBTQ+ poets like Danez Smith and Jericho Brown who have transformed the literary landscape. It is also a region marred by great pain and suffering where our governments are actively restricting our rights, access to healthcare, and demolishing our histories. As young poets, we ask ourselves how do we find our passions, our pleasure, our light, our joys of being human in the South? We are angry and outraged by the acts these states exhibit on our bodies, but through our voices, we can resist and reclaim power.

This panel will explore the various ways poetry works to activate, teach, heal, motivate, and inspire communities. It brings together poets whose work centers community. Poets who address issues and tell stories important to the community and present their work in a manner a broad audience appreciates. The panel will emphasize African American and Filipino solidarities, particularly in the South. Each poet will read or recite work that addresses their respective community, before briefly discussing how poetry compliments their work as activists, community historians, and/or healers.

Kundiman poets Jane Wong, Sally Wen Mao, Tiana Nobile, and Cathy Linh Che share poems that engage the power of rage -- as a means of activism, community care, and radical resistance. As Asian American women, how can poems of rage also resist gendered and racialized stereotypes of silence and submissive complacency? These four poets will share poems that speak to both personal and collective rage -- against colonialist empires, against patriarchal systems of oppression, and toward healing and ancestral love.

Join us for an unforgettable journey at the New Orleans Poetry Festival as three distinct voices, Toni Bee, Jean Dany Joachim, and U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo, weave an evocative tapestry of poetry exploring the profound themes of home, belonging, and the complexity of life and love. These poets, parents and published authors will take you on an immersive poetic experience. Toni Bee, a powerful wordsmith with deep Boston roots , will bring her raw and unapologetic reflections on life, love, and the search for community.

This event will focus on several innovative women working in Intermedia and Visual Poetry. Visual Poetry is expanding at a great pace. Groups such as the Women Asemic Artists and Visual Poets have garnered strenth in numbers and visibility in the visual poetry communities. Three visions of current visual poetry will be presented and discussed. Kristine Snodgrass will cover glitching, including her own work with the body, gender, and error.

Fine Print is an independent literary and visual arts magazine that is distributed free to the public worldwide. Founded on inclusivity and its mission to bolster marginalized voices, Fine Print brings together authors of diverse backgrounds to create a greater collective understanding of how artists should approach environmental crisis, religiosity and spirituality, and physical or mental health issues under late capitalism.

Lavender Ink/Diálogos & Friends present readings and book releases by recent press authors and others, followed by discussion and reception with refreshments (canap's, cash bar).

This panel will discuss poetics with an eye to urgency: its fluidity, expression, and representation. Each artist will read a poem or poems and address their unique experience of focusing oneself on the present--on balance: beyond the banal and the bureaucratic, to the Cartesian and the transcendental. Hurricane Katrina and Sept 11th will serve as seminal backdrops or landscapes of ongoing disaster and survival: DACA, exile, personal grief, and crisis—the uncertainties or certainties that arise with sudden change.

This proposed reading would consist of four authors who recently published full-length poetry debuts from Sundress Publications including Athena Nassar, Evelyn Berry, Caleb Curtiss, and Hannah V Warren. The panel will be moderated by Sundress Publications Executive Director, Erin Elizabeth Smith.

In celebration of Texas Review Press’ 45 years of literary publications and the last five years’ renovations— including new leadership, hefty prizes, genre bending work and the rebranding of the press as TRP— interdisciplinary poets Burnside Soleil and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth and TRP Director J. Bruce Fuller offer a multi-modal reading and Q&A showcasing renegade poetry and art.