Poets Kay Gabriel (Kissing Other People or the House of Fame), Frederick Joseph (We Alive, Beloved), Megan Pinto (Saints of Little Faith), and Margaret Ray (Good Grief, the Ground) read from their new volumes of poetry. Introduced by Nikay Paredes, Academy of American Poets.
Kay Gabriel is the author of A Queen in Bucks County and Kissing Other People or the House of Fame, and the co-editor of We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, all from Nightboat Books. She's the Editorial Director at the Poetry Project, where she edits the Poetry Project Newsletter. Find her recent writing in n+1, Bomb, and Poem-a-Day. Kay has performed at LaMaMa ETC, the UC Berkeley Lunch Poets Series, Performance Space, and the Poesiefestival Berlin. Nightboat will release her next book, Perverts, in Fall 2025. She’s also writing a new novel, Doll Food.
Frederick Joseph is a Westchester-raised two-time NY Times bestselling author and a “genius across genres.” He has written two nonfiction books, a children's book, and explores a new genre with his poetry collection, We Alive, Beloved. Joseph’s books have been named an Amazon Editors’ Pick, notable by the International Literacy Association, Best Children’s Book of the Year by Bank Street College, a Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choice selection, Booklist Editors’ Choice, and more. He has written for The Boston Globe, Essence, Huffington Post, AdWeek, and Cosmopolitan, and won two Letter Review prizes. He lives with his wife Porsche and dog Stokely in New York City.
Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books, 2024). Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Megan has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Storyknife, and
the Peace Studio. Megan received the 2023 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review and was selected for Poets & Writers' 2024 Get the Word Out Poetry Cohort. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.
Margaret Ray grew up in Gainesville, Florida. She is the author of Good Grief, The Ground (BOA Editions, 2023, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize), and Superstitions of the Mid-Atlantic (2020 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship Prize). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Best New Poets, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. A winner of the Third Coast Poetry Prize and a shortlister for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize (UK), she holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.