COUPLET is a quarterly reading series, produced, curated and hosted by poet Leah Umansky since 2011. It features both emerging and established poets. COUPLET is co-hosted by The Red Room in NYC.
THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT: in person AND on Zoom.
To attend virtually, please register here on Eventbrite.
In-Person:
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of two poetry collections, Ghost, Like a Place, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and Spit Back a Boy, which won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He directs the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.
Jennifer Franklin holds degrees in poetry from Brown University and Columbia University School of the Arts. She has published three collections including No Small Gift and If Some God Shakes Your House. A recent recipient of both a CRCF Literature Grant and a City Artist Corps NYFA grant for poetry, she lives in New York City. Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Bennington Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, JAMA, The Nation, Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, and Rhino. Her poem, “Memento Mori: Pistachios,” was featured in Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion, Rhode Island in February 2021. For the past ten years, she has taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center where she serves as Program Director. She also teaches in the MFA Program at Manhattanville College. For more about Franklin’s poetry, visit jenniferfranklinpoet.com.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Ukraine and currently lives in New Jersey. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic which was a finalist for the National Book Award and received the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Katie Farris’s work has been commissioned by MoMA and appears in American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeneys, The Nation, and Poetry. She is the author of the chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the 2020 Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal, and boysgirls, a hybrid-form book, as well as co-translator of many books of poetry. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University. She is currently Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023) is her first book of poems.
On Zoom:
Martín Espada’s latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other collections of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, The Trouble Ball, and Alabanza. He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump. He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, a Letras Boricuas fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Lauren Marie Schmidt is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing; The Voodoo Doll Parade, selected for the Main Street Rag Author’s Choice Chapbook Series; and Psalms of The Dining Room, a sequence of poems about her volunteer experience at a soup kitchen in Eugene, Oregon. Her work has appeared in journals such as North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, PANK, New York Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, The Progressive, and others. Her awards include the So to Speak Poetry Prize, the Neil Postman Prize for Metaphor, The Janet B. McCabe Prize for Poetry, and the Bellevue Literary Review’s Vilcek Prize for Poetry. Her fourth collection, Filthy Labors, chronicles her volunteer teaching experience at a transitional housing program for homeless women in her native New Jersey. Schmidt is currently at work on a Young Adult novel.