Join McNally Jackson Seaport, manhattan’s own coastal refuge, for an evening featuring a range of brilliant minds from NYC's poetry scene.
The title for their new monthly series comes from Herman Melville’s poem “Art”. Poetry, wine, and the sea have always been inextricably intertwined. This reading series seeks to highlight poets from all over the city, and give them a backdrop of McNally Jackson’s bar to read their new work. Come hear poems, drink wine, and enjoy the “pulsed life”.
This month's reading features Ariel Yelen, Brenda Shaughnessy, Emily Lee Luan, and Paolo Javier
Ariel Yelen is the author of I Was Working, recently published by Princeton University Press. Her poems have been published in Social Text, the Baffler, Makhzin, and elsewhere. She received a 2023-2024 Creative & Performing Arts Fulbright to Greece and has taught poetry and interdisci-plinary courses for Columbia School of the Arts, and Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers New Brunswick. As a former editor for the NYC-based publishing collaborative Futurepoem Books, she founded their digital space futurefeed. She lives and works in New York City.
Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回 / Return, a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected for a PSA Chapbook Fellowship. A 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, American Poetry Review, Lithub, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University Newark and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Adelphi University.
The former Queens Borough Poet Laureate (2010-2014), Paolo Javier has produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason), including the cassette LP/pamphlet Ur’lyeh/ Aklopolis’ from Texte und Tone, and the booklet/cassette EP ‘Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours’ from NION Editions/Temporary Tapes. The recipient of a Rauschenberg Foundation Artist Grant, Javier is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including ‘Near Your Mirror Home (Stay On)’, just published by Poets of Queens. Born and raised in Manila, he lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, unceded Lenapehoking.
Brenda Shaughnessy is the Okinawan-Irish American author of seven poetry collections, including Tanya (Knopf 2023, Bloodaxe 2024, UK); Liquid Flesh: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 2022, UK); The Octopus Museum (Knopf 2019), a New York Times Notable Book; and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon 2012), finalist for the Griffin International Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon 2008) received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the NBCC award. She has received the Howard Foundation Fellowship of Brown University, the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship, a 2013 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and other honors. Currently, Shaughnessy is co-creating the production of Sensorium Ex, an opera for which she wrote the libretto, which will premiere in 2025.