Mic Check! Hosted by poet and formerly undocumented activist Sonia Guinansaca and pin@y transgender queer poet Kay Ulanday Barrett, come through to our first Mouth to Mouth of 2016. Our ongoing open mic series, Mouth to Mouth asks QTPOC and rising migrant artists to step up and share their work in a safe community space. This edition of Mouth to Mouth features poets Rajiv Mohabir and Candice Iloh.

Rajiv Mohabir’s new poetry collection The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016) explores a queer Indo-Caribbean brown youth stuck between diaspora and xenophobia, the migration of the past and the skin of the present. The book’s title nods to taxidermy manuals and animal tracking guides, both source texts appropriated by Rajiv, as well as to the speaker’s act of cutting themselves. As AAWW homie and Four Way judge Brenda Shaughnessy writes, “Rajiv Mohabir’s debut collection is electric with fierce love–animal, erotic, obliterating… With razor (what else?) precision, this poet lays bare not only the heart in its love, loss and world of care, but in its utility, its chambers and the question of what blood is, contains, and cannot ever be. The poet is no taxidermist, as his subjects are live and are survivors.” Check out some of Rajiv’s poetry in The Margins and the book trailer here.

First generation Nigerian-American writer Candice Iloh is the author of the chapbooks Catalyst (2009) (a Best Book nominee at the 2010 National Underground Spoken Word & Poetry Awards), And Become (2012) and Break Fast From Her Skin (2014). She’s advanced to the final rounds of the Graffiti DC Slam, Beltway Poetry Slam, and 11th Hour Poetry Slam. (Check out this video of her in the final rounds of the Beltway Poetry Slam here.) Candice has performed at The Nuyorican Poets Café, the Women in Poetry & Hip Hop celebration at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, and as part of the Africa In Motion performing arts series at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.

This event is open to the public. Swing by 6:30p and sign up! Program starts at 7pm.  

$5 suggested donation
Open to the public

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