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Celebrate Word is Bond’s new home at AAWW with our inaugural partnership reading!

Attendance is FREE but suggested donations will benefit Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund & Racing Magpie, an organization supporting Lakota artists & culture bearers. If you have the means, please consider sparing what you’re able & supporting these worthy causes. Even if you can’t, sharing space with you is a gift, so please join us!

Featuring readings from Layli Long Soldier, Megan Fernandes, Ghinwa Jawhari, & Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Co-hosted & co-curated by Sadia Hassan. Organized in partnership with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Hosted by Anthony Thomas Lombardi.

If you are unable to attend but still wish to contribute, consider donating whatever is in your means, & most importantly, spread the word!

Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Megan Fernandes is a writer living in NYC. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. Her second book of poetry, Good Boys, was a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize, the Saturnalia Book Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was published with Tin House Books in February 2020. Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She is also a book reviewer for the Poetry Foundation and teaches in the low-residency Pan-European MFA program at Cedar Crest College.

Ghinwa Jawhari is a Lebanese American writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of the chapbook “BINT” (2021, RadixMedia) and founder of the Koukash Review. She was a 2021 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction, essays, and poetry appear in Catapult, Mizna, The Adroit Journal, Narrative, and elsewhere.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Oxford American, POETRY, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she is working on a poetry and nonfiction collection while raising her son in Los Angeles. Her essay collection, CHUECA, is forthcoming from Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2023. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.

Sadia Hassan is the author of Enumeration (Akashic Books, 2020), part of the New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Set. Hassan has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, The Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Mesa Refuge. Winner of the 2021 Georgia Review Emerging Writer’s Fellowship, the 2020 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award and 2019 finalist for The Krause Essay Prize, Hassan is currently working on a collection of poems about archives and women prophets. More of her work can be found in The Georgia Review, The American Academy of Poetry, Boston Review, Longreads, and elsewhere.

Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a Pushcart-nominated poet, organizer, activist, and educator. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered reading series under the umbrella of AAWW that raises funds for transnational relief efforts and mutual aid organizations, and currently serves as assistant poetry editor for Sundog Lit. A recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, his work has appeared or will soon in Guernica, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.