An evening with Sumita Chakraborty, Cortney Lamar Charleston, & Carey Salerno on Zoom

Join us for an evening of award-winning new poetry by Sumita Chakraborty (Arrow, Alice James Books), Cortney Lamar Charleston (Doppelgangbanger, Haymarket Books), and Carey Salerno (Tributary, Persea Books). This reading will take place via Zoom. The Zoom link will be emailed after registration. (Please check spam / promotions folder for this email and email admin@writerscenter.org with any questions.)

Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. Her debut collection of poetry, Arrow, was released in September 2020 with Alice James Books in the United States and Carcanet Press in the United Kingdom, and has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. Her first scholarly book, tentatively titled Grave Dangers: Death, Ethics, and Poetics in the Anthropocene, is in progress. She is Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she teaches in literary studies and creative writing. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2019, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. Her essays most recently appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), Modernism/modernity, College Literature, and elsewhere. Previously, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, at Emory University. She is a proud alumna of Wellesley College, where she received her BA, and she received her doctorate in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory. In 2017, she received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation; in 2018, her poem “And death demands a labor” was shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem by the Forward Arts Foundation (UK); in 2020, she became a Kundiman Fellow (deferred to 2021 due to COVID-19). Formerly, she was poetry editor of AGNI Magazine and art editor of At Length.

Cortney Lamar Charleston is originally from the Chicago suburbs. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a BS in Economics from the Wharton School and BA in Urban Studies from the College of Arts & Sciences. While attending Penn, he was most interested in the business as a political entity, the relationship between the public and private sectors and the physical and sociological construction of cities. It was during his college years that he began writing and performing poetry as a member of The Excelano Project. Charleston’s academic interests, coupled with his upbringing spent bouncing between Chicago’s South Side and its South and West suburbs, immediately influence his written work. Charleston’s poems paint themselves against the backgrounds of past and present; they grapple with race, masculinity, class, family, faith and how identity is, functionally, a transition zone between all of these competing markers. Said differently, his poetry is a kind of marriage between art and activism, a call for a more involved and empathetic understanding of the diversity of the human experience. This same line of thought frames his philosophy as Poetry Editor at The Rumpus. He also currently serves on the Alice James Books Editorial Board.