An Evening with Douglas Kearney, Omotara James, and Cindy Veach via Zoom

This reading will take place via Zoom. Please register to get the Zoom link which will be sent immediately at the time of registration via email. Please check your spam filter and email admin@writerscenter.org with any questions. This reading is FREE though donations towards the poets’ honoraria are greatly appreciated!

Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and librettist who has published seven books that bridge thematic concerns such as politics, African-American culture, masks, the Trickster figure, and contemporary music. His most recent collection, Sho, aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Kearney is also the author of Buck Studies, which was awarded the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, and the silver medal for the California Book Award in Poetry. Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and, was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection; and Patter examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, was named a Notable New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America, and has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem and The Rauschenberg Foundation. His work has appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review, and anthologies, including Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, Best American Poetry, Best American Experimental Writing, and What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Poets in America. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family a little west of Minneapolis, MN and teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Omotara James is the author of the poetry collection, Song of My Softening, forthcoming from Alice James Books, April 2022 and the chapbook, “Daughter Tongue,” selected by African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Akashic Books, for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. James’ poems appear in print and digital journals, including The Poetry Foundation, The Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series, The Believer, Literary Hub, Poetry Society of America. Her work has been recently anthologised and selected for inclusion in Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology (A Wave Blue World, 2021), Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press, 2020), Islands Are But Mountains (Platypus Press, 2019). James is the recipient of a City Artist Corps Grant; a CRCF Literature Award; a NYSCA/NYFA Poetry Fellowship; an Artist Relief grant; a 92Y/ Discovery Poetry Award; a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Poetry; a 2019 finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize; the inaugural Thomas Lux Scholarship from The Palm Beach Poetry Festival; a Nancy P. Schnader Academy of American Poets Prize; and residency fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and Lambda Literary, among other awards and recognitions. Born in Britain, she is the daughter of Nigerian and Trinidadian immigrants. She has lived in England, Scotland and was raised primarily in America. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Hofstra University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University.

Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind, (CavanKerry Press, October 2021) and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate Press). Her poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Chicago Review, Prairie Schooner, Sugar House Review, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode, The Journal, North American Review, Verse Daily, Salamander and elsewhere. Her poem, “This Patch Where the Light Cannot Reach,” was selected by Mary Ruefle for the Philip Booth Poetry Prize (Salt Hill Journal). Her sonnet crown, “Witch Kitsch,” was selected by Marilyn Nelson for the Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club). Cindy received an MFA from the University of Oregon where she was a Graduate Teaching Fellow and an assistant poetry editor for Northwest Review. She is co-poetry editor of Mom Egg Review.