HOME is a poetry reading, open mic, and workshop series led by Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola. It consists of a featured reader and brief open mic every first Friday of the month, followed by a writing workshop the following Saturday morning. Anthony Febo will host the readings and open mics.
The theme, HOME, is born out of our current space, time, crisis, and future-shaping. What does home mean? What isn’t home? Who is lacking home? Now that we are all home so much, how do we like our homes? Ourselves? Our families? What is home, in the literal and figurative sense? Is the body a type of home? How so? Is a poem a type of home? How do we integrate this into content and craft?
HOME is curated by our current Poet Laureate, Porsha Olayiwola. A Boston transplant and Roxbury resident, Olayiwola seeks to create a shared digital space for Bostonians to write and share at the intersection of poetry and storytelling.
Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York . He has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His forthcoming book of poems from Norton is called Floaters. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and reissued by Northwestern. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
This project is made possible in part by the Academy of American Poets, with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.