Join Cave Canem for an evening of poetry in Bryant Park with Teri Cross Davis, Cynthia Manick, Ladan Osman, and Iain Haley Pollock. Free and open to the public. In case of rain, the event is held under a tent at the Reading Room.
Teri Cross Davis is the author of Haint (Gival Press, 2016). She is a Cave Canem fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and has attended the Soul Mountain Writer’s Retreat, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have been published in many anthologies including Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Growing Up Girl, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees, and Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC. She is the Poetry and Lectures Coordinator at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and resides in Silver Spring, MD with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.
Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). A Pushcart nominee with a MFA in Creative Writing from the New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Poets House, and the Vermont Studio Center. She serves as East Coast Editor of Jamii Publishing and is Founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Her poem “Things I Carry Into the World” was recently made into a short film by Motionpoems, an organization dedicated to video poetry. Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-DaySeries, African American Review, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli, Muzzle Magazine, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Ladan Osman is a Somali born artist whose work is a lyric and exegetic response to problems of race, gender, displacement, and colonialism. She is the author of The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of a Sillerman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner and Rumpus, and she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and Luminarts Foundation, among numerous others. Osman’s writing has been translated into over 10 languages. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Iain Haley Pollock lives in Mount Kisco, NY, and and teaches English at Rye Country Day School. His first collection of poems, Spit Back a Boy, earned the 2010 Cave Canem Prize. His work has appeared in several literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Callaloo. Iain received his undergraduate degree at Haverford College and his MFA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University, where he won the Joyce Carol Oates Award. He held a Cave Canem Fellowship from 2006-2009. He was the Solstice MFA Program’s first Cave Canem Partner Poet and joined the MFA faculty in summer 2012.