Join us for another Brooklyn Poets Reading Series event at 144 Montague Street on Saturday, September 30, at 6:30 PM, featuring Wo Chan, Tawanda Mulalu and Sarah Ruhl! An official 2022 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event, the reading is free and open to the public and will also be livestreamed via Zoom. All guests (in person and virtual) should register to attend below.
Wine reception will begin at 6 PM, and a book signing will follow the reading. Please note that due to the current transmission level of COVID-19 in the NYC area, all guests are required to wear a mask inside our space, except for readers at a safe social distance on stage.
Named one of the best reading series in NYC by Time Out New York, the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series is free and open to the public. Each reading features three poets, with at least one from Brooklyn and one from outside the borough, pairing emerging with more established poets and focusing on those from underrepresented communities. Readings are curated and emceed by Brooklyn Poets Executive Director Jason Koo.
Closed captioning will be available through the livestream. For more information and/or to request additional accommodations, email us at [email protected] or call 718-374-1953.
Wo Chan, who performs as the Illustrious Pearl, is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in Poetry, Wussy, No Tokens and the Margins. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts and elsewhere. They live in Brooklyn, New York. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.
Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. His first full-length collection of poetry, Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die, was published this fall by Princeton University Press. His chapbook Nearness was selected by Brandon Shimoda as the winner of the The New Delta Review 2020-21 Chapbook Contest and published earlier this year. Tawanda’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Lana Turner, Lolwe, New England Review, Paris Review, A Public Space and elsewhere. His writing has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, the Community of Writers, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and Tin House Books. Tawanda has also served as a Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine and as the first Diversity and Inclusion Chair of the Harvard Advocate. He was recently awarded Denver Quarterly’s 2022 Bin Ramke Prize for Poetry.
Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, essayist and poet. Her plays, including In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, The Clean House and Passion Play, have been produced on and off Broadway, around the country and internationally and translated into over fifteen languages. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony award nominee, she has received the Steinberg award, the Sam French award, the Susan Smith Blackburn award, a Whiting award, the Lily award, a PEN award for mid-career playwrights and the MacArthur award. She is also the author of two books of poetry, Love Poems in Quarantine (Copper Canyon, 2022) and 44 Poems for You (Copper Canyon, 2020), and a collaboration with poet Max Ritvo, Letters from Max (Milkweed, 2018). Her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and her recent memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face was listed by Time as a must-read book of 2021. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her family.