Join poets Kay Ulanday Barrett, Bernard Ferguson, torrin a. greathouse, and Khadijah Queen as they share newly commissioned poems on the environment. The event will take place on Friday, March 26, 8 pm ET (via Zoom)
This event is presented as part of the Poetry Coalition’s collaborative exploration of the theme “It is burning./ It is dreaming./ It is waking up.: Poetry & Environmental Justice.” Events in this series aim to demonstrate how poetry can positively provoke questions in communities about environmental justice and spark increased engagement with this urgent topic. In partnership with Lambda Literary.
The Poets
Kay Ulanday Barrett
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. Barrett’s poetry collection More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press) received a 2021 Stonewall Book Honor Award by the American Library Association. K. has featured at The Lincoln Center, The United Nations, Symphony Space, The Poetry Foundation, Princeton University, The Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, and Brooklyn Museum. They’ve received fellowships from MacDowell, Lambda Literary Review, Drunken Boat, VONA, and Macondo. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Asian American Literary Review, them., NYLON, Vogue, PBS News Hour, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, The Advocate, The Rumpus,
F(r)iction, RaceForward, and more. In their political work, they have served on boards and committees for The Transgender Law Center, Sylivia Rivera Law Project, The Disability Justice Collective, Res Artis, and recently was on the advisory committee for Crip Camp, a documentary on Netflix. Currently, they remix their mama’s recipes and reside in Jersey City with their jowly dog. www.kaybarrett.net
Bernard Ferguson
Bernard Ferguson (he/him and they/them) is a Bahamian poet and proser. By great luck,
he’s the winner of the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award and the 2019 92Y
Discovery Contest, among others. His work has been supported by NYU’s Global Research
Initiative, New York’s Writers in the Public Schools, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, and
Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency. By the kindness of friends and editors, his work has been featured, published or is forthcoming in The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He’s currently working on a nonfiction project, The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2023), about Hurricane Dorian, the Alliance of Small Island States, and how small islands have been facing the climate crisis for decades.
torrin a. greathouse
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender, cripple-punk, MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her work is published in POETRY, New England Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and Best New Poets 2020. torrin recently received the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship; they have also received fellowships from the Effing Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. torrin was a special mention for the 2020 Pushcart Prize; she is the youngest winner of the Poetry Foundation’s J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize. torrin is the author of two chapbooks, Therǝ is a Case That I Ɐm (Damaged Goods Press, 2017) and boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018).
Their debut collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, was published in 2020 by Milkweed Editions.
Khadijah Queen
Khadijah Queen is the author of six books, including I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men &
What I Had On (2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating,” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.”
Poems and essays appear in Harper’s Magazine, Buzzfeed, North American Women Poets in the 21st Century, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and widely elsewhere. Her latest poetry collection, Anodyne, was published in August 2020 by Tin House. She teaches creative writing at University of Colorado, Boulder, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver.
Friday, March 26, 8 pm ET (via Zoom)
Supported by American Sign Language
