In-Person | Thursday | June 5 | 7-9pm
Experience the newest poetry collections from Latif Askia Ba and Rob Macaisa Colgate, two poets whose disability poetics expand imagined possibilities of form, meaning, and embodiment. In Ba’s The Choreic Period (Milkweed, 2025), Ba braids tenderness, humor, and musicality that dances his readers through the pages. Each poem becomes a practice of reclamation and letting go. Ba’s groundbreaking work encourages and inspires us all to speak, and speak loudly. Colgate’s Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025), experiments with form and language by ushering us through an accessible art gallery. Colgate intertwines accessibility symbols with markers of modern life (pop culture, social media, etc), and the power of queer love and friendships with a strikingly new and original voice.
Readings in Kray Hall with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room.
Events at Poets House are popular, and seating is first-come, first-seated. We have several seats reserved for people with access needs. If events reach capacity, seating will be available in an overflow viewing room.
About the Poets:
Latif Askia Ba is a poet from Brooklyn, NY. Dancing in and out of various forms, he tries again and again to realize the music of the disabled body-mind-universe. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and was the Print Poetry Editor for the Columbia Journal’s sixty-first issue. You can find his work in Poetry magazine and Poem-A-Day. His newest collection, The Choreic Period, was published by Milkweed Editions.
Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). A 2025 NEA and 2024 Ruth Lilly Fellow, he is the managing poetry editor at Foglifter and lives in Chicago.