An Evening with Cynthia Manick, Yesenia Montilla, Sonia Greenfield, & Kiki Petrosino (via Zoom)

Join Jennifer Franklin & Sophia Bannister as they welcome Cynthia Manick, Yesenia Montilla, Sonia Greenfield, and Kiki Petrosino to read from their latest books—three poetry collections and a memoir.

NB: This reading will take place on Zoom and is free and open to the public. Donations towards the poets’ honoraria are welcome as is buying the poets’ books! The link will be sent to the email that you use to register as soon as you reserve a spot. (Please check your spam folder and save the link to your calendar.) It will also be sent to you the day of the reading for your convenience.

Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, forthcoming 2023), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Publishing, 2021), and author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among others.  Winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, Manick is Founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue; and her poem “Things I Carry Into the World” was made into a film by Motionpoems, an organization dedicated to video poetry, and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month. A storyteller and performer at literary festivals, libraries, universities, and most recently the Brooklyn and Frye museum’s, Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Callaloo, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently serves on the board of the International Women’s Writing Guild and the editorial board of Alice James Books. Her book, No Sweet Without Brine was on the Publishers Weekly list of books to look out for this spring!

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. Her poetry has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, as well as the literary journals The Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Best of American Poets (2021, 2022) & others. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation & is a 2014 CantoMundo Fellow & a 2020 NYFA Fellow. Her first collection The Pink Box is published by Willow Books & was Longlisted for a PEN award in 2016. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body is published by Four Way Books. She lives in Harlem NY.

Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of two full-length collections of poetry. Letdown, released in March 2020, was selected for the Marie Alexander Series and published by White Pine Press. Her collection, Boy With a Halo at the Farmer’s Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize and was published in 2015. Her chapbook, American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press chapbook prize, and her forthcoming chapbook, Helen of Troy is High AF, will be out with Harbor Editions in January 2023. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, including in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and Willow Springs. She lives with her family in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College, edits the Rise Up Review, and advocates for both neurodiversity and the decentering of the cis/het white hegemony.

Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she is a Professor of Poetry. Petrosino is the recipient of a MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors.