A poetry reading featuring Brenda Shaughnessy, Christopher Greggs, and Julia Guez, hosted by Sara Munjack.
Jersey City Reads Poems is a poetry reading series and program celebrating local Jersey City-based poets and beyond. The series seeks to capture the unique richness of diversity and culture that this city offers, with accessibility, equity, and compensation at its core mission.
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of five poetry books, including The Octopus Museum, a New York Times Notable Book. Her forthcoming books are Liquid Flesh: New and Selected (Fall 2022, Bloodaxe) and Tanya (2023, Knopf) Recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is a Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.
Christopher J. Greggs is a poet, designer, and recording artist living in Jersey City, NJ. He is a Cave Canem, Tin House, Callaloo, and Watering Hole Fellow recipient of the 2020-2021 Cave Canem Poetry Coalition Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as TriQuarterly, Winter Tangerine, Texas Review, and This Is What America Looks Like Anthology (Washington Writers' Publishing House), among others. He earned his MFA in Poetry from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. You can follow Christopher on Instagram at @mynameisgreggs.
Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. The Certain Body is her second collection of poetry, written while she was recovering from COVID in the spring of 2020. For her poetry, fiction and translations, Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation, as well as a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America, New York; she's currently the senior managing director of design and implementation there. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers.
Sara Munjack, founder and host of Jersey City Reads Poems, holds an MFA from Rutgers-Newark and works at Four Way Books. She has poems published in Cosmonauts Avenue, Pigeon Pages, BOAAT, Gandy Dancer, ISO Magazine, tele-art mag, Grist Journal, and The Common. You can find her at sarabellamunjack.com.