Poets Will Brewer (I Know Your Kind), Layli Long Soldier (Whereas), Morgan Parker (There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé), and Javier Zamora (Unaccompanied) read from their work and discuss how their new collections explore distinct perspectives of the American experience. Moderated by Hafizah Geter, Little A & Day One, Amazon Publishing.
Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Hafizah Geter serves on the board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, and co-curates the reading series EMPIRE with Ricardo Maldonado. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Linebreak, among others. She is on the poetry committee and book ends committee for the Brooklyn Book Festival and is currently an editor for Little A and Day One from Amazon Publishing.
William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, selected for a 2016 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Nation, A Public Space, and others. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She has served as a contributing editor of Drunken Boat. Her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, and other publications. She is the recipient of the 2015 NACF National Artist Fellowship and a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship. She is the author of the acclaimed debut poetry collection WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). Long Soldier resides in Tsaile, Arizona, where she is an English faculty member at Diné College.
Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. With Tommy Pico, Parker co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Fellowship and the 2016 Barnes and Noble Writer for Writers Award, his poems have appeared in Granta, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His first poetry collection Unaccompanied is forthcoming in the fall of 2017.