Killing Rage: A Festival of Poets with Musical Guest Artist Like Water & Featuring Jasmine Mans
In a nod to feminist bell hooks and the beginning of April as National Poetry Month, CityLit Festival Reimagined II ends with Killing Rage: A Festival of Poets and we’re bringing you some of the best this region and beyond has to offer with featured guest poet Jasmine Mans, whose latest collection Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to Black daughters. The set opens with indie vocal artist, and a treasured member of the CityLit Fam, Like Water who sets the tone and gifts us with the beauty of her jeweled voice. For the first time, CityLit gets to publicly celebrate the 2019 Harriss Poetry Prize winner, Burgi Zenhaeusern, whose prize-winning work Behind Normalcy (seems a fitting title for today’s times) is “an opportunity to explore the tense and probing questions we hide behind and hide from in polite society” … “drawing our attention to the urgency of both grief and hope.” The 2020 D.C. Youth Poet Laureate, and six-time Poetry Grand Slam Champion, Marjan Naderi elevates the Muslim comminity by sharing personal narratives as an Afghan-American woman using fearless poetry to help others who feel disconnected from the world. Award-winning poet Arao Ameny is a Maryland-based writer and poet from Lira, Lango region, Northern Uganda where she calls home. Her first published poem, “Home Is a Woman,” won the Southern Review’s 2020 James Olney Award. Dora Malech’s latest collection of poetry, Flourish is said to engage “in a project of enlargement steeped in granular attentiveness … Dazzled and mournful often at the same time, Malech’s poems keep asking, “you—will you attend?” Multidisciplinary, performance artist, poet Bobbi Rush, called “the creative architect of her own universe” where her poetry reads like meditations. NAACP Image Award-winning poet Truth Thomas serves as Master of Ceremonies for the final event of this Festival season.