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. Workshop topics are listed below.
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.
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019, winner of the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award. His memoir, ANTIMAN, won the 2019 Reckless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize and is forthcoming 2021. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College, translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
This project is made possible in part by the Academy of American Poets, with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.