Mic Check! Are you a writer? Come share your work at our first virtual edition of our open mic, Mouth to Mouth. Hosted by AAWW’s fave poets Kay Ulanday Barrett and Ashna Ali, this edition of Mouth to Mouth features Donika Kelly, Golden, and Mejdulene B. Shomali. Mouth to Mouth seeks to provide a safe community space for QTPOC and rising migrant artists.
*This event will take place on Zoom. Links to the event will be posted the day of.
**To sign up as a performer/reader, please e-mail tle@aaww.org. Space is limited & it’s first come, first served.
***Don’t want to perform but want to grab a seat in the audience, RSVP HERE.
KAY ULANDAY BARRETT is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. K. has featured at The Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Princeton University, Tucson Poetry Festival, NY Poetry Festival, The Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, & Brooklyn Museum. They are a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee and received fellowships/residencies from Lambda Literary Review, VONA/Voices, The Home School, and Macondo. They are Guest Editor for Nat.Brut & Guest Faculty for The Poetry Foundation. Their contributions include: Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, Asian American Literary Review, PBS News Hour, F(r)iction, VIDA Review, NYLON, The Huffington Post, Them., Bitch Magazine, Apogee, & more. Their first book, When The Chant Comes was published by Topside Press in 2016. Their second collection More Than Organs, will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press, Spring 2020. See their work at Kaybarrett.net or on social media, @brownroundboi .
ASHNA ALI is a queer Bangladeshi poet raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn. Their poetry has been published in several independent journals including Nat. Brut., HeART Online, The Felt, No Dear, Ginger Mag, femmescapes, and Bone Bouquet. They serve as assistant professor of literature at Bard High School Early College. They are currently working on their first book manuscript. IG and Twitter: @doctordushtu
DONIKA KELLY is the author of the chapbook Aviarium (fivehundred places) and the full-length collections The Renunciations (forthcoming, Graywolf Press) and Bestiary (Graywolf Press), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
GOLDEN (they/them) is a black gender-nonconforming trans-femme photographer and poet raised in Hampton, VA, currently residing in Boston, MA. Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets (2019), and a Pushcart Nomination (wildness, 2019). Their work has been featured on/at the Shade Journal, the Offing, wildness, Button Poetry, Buzzfeed, i-D, Interview Magazine, & elsewhere. Golden holds a BFA in Photography from New York University and is currently a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence. Instagram: goldenthem_. Twitter: goldenthem. Website: goldengoldengolden.com.
MEJDULENE B. SHOMALI is a Palestinian poet and Assistant Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her poetry can be read in Cosmonauts Avenue, Copper Nickel, Tinderbox, Diode Press, Mizna, and other journals. Her academic prose can be read in Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the US, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, The Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, and several edited collections.
