HOME Reading and Open Mic: Xandria Philips

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. 

Xandria Phillips is a writer, abstract artist, and educator from rural Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, and a LAMBDA Literary Award for their book HULL (Nightboat Books 2019), Xandria has received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, Oberlin College, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Xandria is also a Dream Space Residency recipient at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and their chapbook, Reasons for Smoking, won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Their poetry has been featured in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, BOMB Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, and Virginia Quarterly Review. 

This project is made possible in part by the Academy of American Poets, with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.