asian american/african american poetry reading on thurs

co-spo'd by cave canem and the asian american writer's workshop. details after the jump. are you as excited as i am?

Thursday, March 6, 7:30 pm
Third Annual Asian American/African American Poetry Reading
Curated by Tracy K. Smith and Tina Chang
Cosponsored by Cave Canem

The Asian American and African American communities gather for a night of brilliant poetry. Readings by Meena Alexander, Jeffery Renard Allen, Regie Cabico, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, R. Erica Doyle and Bakar Wilson.

Meena Alexander's poetry includes Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004), and Quickly Changing River (2008) all published by TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems (Everyman's Library/ Knopf, 2005) and author of the memoir Fault Lines (Feminist Press 1993/ 2003) She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and a novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), which won The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction. Born in Chicago, he holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of English at The City University of New York and teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School. He is the Founding Director of the Pan African Literary Forum. Allen's book of short stories, Bread and the Land, will be published in 2008. He is presently at work on Talking Talk, a book of interviews and conversations with fiction writers of African descent from around the world, and the novel Song of the Shank, based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom.

Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam & has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Spoken Word Revolution & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He is the recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, The Barnes & Nobles Writers for Writers Award, A Larry Neal Prize for Poetry and a 2008 DC Commission for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. He is the artistic director of Sol & Soul, an arts and activist organization & co-sponsor of Split This Rock's Poetry Festival: a celebration of Poetry of Provocation & Witness in Washington, DC March 20-23 2008.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs was born in Won Ju Si, South Korea. Her debut collection of poetry, Paper Pavilion (White Pine Prees 2007), is the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in 5 AM, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, MiPOesias, Poetry NZ, among others and have been anthologized in Echoes Upon Echoes (The Asian American Writers' Workshop, 2003) and Language For A New Century (W. W. Norton 2008). She is a fellow at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC SummerTIME Writing Program. Currently, she lives in New York City.

R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn, NY to Trinidadian parents. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Ms. Magazine, Black Issues Book Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Utne Reader, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire and Sinister Wisdom and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2001, Voices Rising, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gumbo: Short Fiction by Black Writers, Gathering Ground, Best Black Women's Erotica 2, and Role Call is forthcoming in Bloom, Our Antilles: Queer Writing from the Caribbean and Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets. She is the recipient of various grants and awards, including a Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry and a Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction. She received her MFA in Poetry from The New School and works as a teacher and literacy coach at Vanguard High. Her manuscript, proxy, was selected by Claudia Rankine as a finalist for the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Bakar Wilson's work has appeared in the Vanderbilt Review, the Lumberyard, and three Cave Canem anthologies. He is a native of Tennessee and currently teaches at Medgar Evers College.

@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)

$5 suggested donation