Live on Zoom, join Jenny Zhang, Tommy Pico, Morgan Parker, and Khadijah Queen for a night of poetry brought to you by Skylight Books.
This event is free to attend, but we ask that you register here to access the Zoom meeting information. If you appreciate Skylight's virtual events programming, please donate to support future events! 100% of donations go towards covering store expenses as we weather the shutdown.
Please note: this event will be recorded. Audio from the event will be posted to Skylight Books podcast page.
Jenny Zhang’s debut story collection, Sour Heart, conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City and is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Robert. W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. With writing that often focuses on the Chinese American immigrant experience, Jenny Zhang is known for her frank humor, emotional directness, and subversive thought about race, femininity, and love in contemporary America.
Tommy Pico is author of the books IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, Feed, and myriad keen tweets including “sittin on the cock of the gay.” Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now splits his time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn. He co-curates the reading series Poets with Attitude, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot and Scream, Queen! and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker’s debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.”
Khadijah Queen, PhD, is the author of five books, most recently I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating,” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.“ Individual poems and prose appear in Poetry, Fence, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast, Poor Claudia, The Offing, jubilat, Memoir, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, LitHub, New Delta Review, The Force of What's Possible and widely elsewhere. Other reviews of her work can be found in BOMB Magazine, SCOUT, Publishers Weekly, Open Letters Monthly, The Volta, Kenyon Review, and other publications. Her 2019 op-ed on poetry and disability, co-edited with Jillian Weise, appeared in The New York Times. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at University of Colorado, Boulder, and serves as core faculty for the Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University. Her sixth book, ANODYNE, is forthcoming from Tin House in August 2020, available for Pre-Order.