Join us for the exciting kick off of Brooklyn Public Library's new pop-up library space! Librarians, neighbors, and poets will gather for a housewarming and afternoon reading. Our guest poets include Ben Purkert, Julia Guez, Christopher Encarnacion, and Matt Spohn.
Ben Purkert is the author of For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books). His poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. A contributing editor at Guernica, he is the founder of Back Draft, an interview series focused on poetry and revision. A former New York Times fellow at NYU, he teaches at Rutgers.
Julia Guez's fiction, essays, interviews, poetry and translations have appeared in POETRY, The Guardian, Boston Review, PEN Poetry Series, BOMB, The Seattle Review and Hyperallergic. Her debut collection, In An Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also A Frame was published by Four Way Books this September. Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation. For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America; she’s currently the senior managing director of program implementation. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers and writes poetry reviews for Publishers Weekly. Guez lives in Brooklyn.
Christopher Encarnacion was born, raised, and still resides in Union City, a working-class town in New Jersey. He takes its mentality and applies it to being a martial arts professor, photographer, and poet. He holds a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, an MFA in creative writing, and photographs regularly on the streets on NYC. Christopher is interested in the way all three lend him a different vision of the world.
Matt Spohn is a poet, essayist, and explorer. He received his MFA in creative writing from Pacific University and has been published in Alpinist, Climbing, Rock & Ice and more. He is the recipient of a 2018 RACC grant and is a staff writer for Nike Sportswear. Matt has free climbed El Capitan, climbed on five continents, and established First Ascents throughout the US. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Michelle, and their Chihuahuas Zoozoo and Cashew.