Touted as the “best poetry event in the borough” by Brooklyn Magazine and “one of the most innovative literary events in the city” by Time Out New York, the Brooklyn Poets Yawp is a monthly poetry workshop & open mic held on the second Monday of every month from 6:30 to 9 PM. The event is hosted at 144 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights and also livestreamed via Zoom (closed captions available).
6:00 PM: doors open & open mic sign-up begins
6:30 to 7:30 PM: generative writing workshop
7:45 to 9 PM: open mic
Guests can purchase tickets to attend in person at 144 Montague Street or virtually via Zoom (note: virtual guests cannot read for the open mic). Advance online ticket sales for in-person attendance end at 5 PM on the day of the event. After that, tickets for in-person attendance can be purchased at the door until we reach capacity; tickets for virtual attendance will be available until the start of the workshop at 6:30 PM. A Zoom link will be emailed to all ticket holders. Participants are encouraged to purchase tickets in advance for in-person attendance, as the event usually sells out. Brooklyn Poets members take $5 off.
Each reader for the open mic can read one poem of 3 minutes max. Participants can purchase one of ten tickets in advance to reserve an open mic spot. Once those tickets sell out, all other participants who'd like to read for the open mic can purchase a ticket to sign up at the door on a first-come, first-serve basis. We usually have time for about 20–22 readers.
One poem at every open mic is declared Yawp Poem of the Month by audience vote. The winning writer earns a Brooklyn Poets tote bag, one of the twelve spots in our Yawp Poem of the Year contest and a ticket to our annual Awards Gala in December. We record and publish a monthly Yawpcast, so note that by reading you’re giving us permission to distribute your recording, unless you notify us otherwise. Also note that by participating in the Yawp, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy. Effective January 8, 2024, all event attendees except readers at a safe distance on stage are required to wear masks due to the current rise in cases in NYC. Our full policy can be found at the end of the event description. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.
Workshop Leader & Featured Reader
Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. She is half of the ODES FOR YOU TOUR with poet, musician and visual artist Shira Erlichman and, with poet Morgan Parker, she runs the Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn. In 2016, Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and in 2017 she was awarded a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.