Join PEN America for this virtual event to celebrate community and poetry. This incredible evening featuring emerging and established poets will center and celebrate community poets, their role and their work.
Poets: Arlo Pate, Kevin L. Tarver, Kevin Sanchez, and RuthAnn
Program Mentors: Erika Wade and Gabriel Dozal
Program Advisors: Salaam Green and Ofelia Montelongo
The Zoom link will be provided the day of the event.
Poems from this event will be available in Watching for the Moon Above: Poets Across Lines (Community Poetry from Birmingham & Tucson) a collaborative zine produced by Pansy Press. You can download the zine for free at the end of the reading.
About Poets Across Lines:
Poets Across Lines is a cross-regional program presented in Birmingham, Alabama and Tucson, Arizona offering poets in the two regions financial and material support to create original poems around the themes of housing, immigration, and/or LGBTQIA+ experience. The program is committed to providing an opportunity for poets local to each city who don’t have the support and resources of academic spaces. Poets Across Lines aims to serve poets who identify as Black, Indigenous, persons of color, LGBTQIA+, immigrants, and poets with disabilities. Through mentor-led workshops, curated introductions to guest speakers, and financial support, this four-month program builds an intimately connected cohort of non-academic poets across regions to create work that tells the story of their communities—joys, challenges, and resilience.
Learn more on our website or by emailing [email protected].
This program is made possible with funding from the Poetry Foundation. The Poetry Foundation recognizes the power of words to transform lives and works to amplify poetry and celebrate poets by fostering spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry.