Brooklyn Poets Reading Series Featuring Xandria Phillips, Donika Kelly, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths
The Brooklyn Poets Reading Series returns on Thursday, July 23, at 7 PM via Zoom, featuring poets Xandria Phillips, Donika Kelly and Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The reading is free and open to the public. All guests must register through the link below to receive an invitation to join the event on Zoom.
Guests can register by choosing either a free ticket or a donation ticket (suggestion donation: $5–10). Donations will help us support three organizations doing vital work right now: the First Nations COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund, designed to distribute funds efficiently and swiftly to Native nonprofit organizations and tribal programs that need it most; For The Gworls’ Medical Fund, which pays for Black trans folks to travel to clinics and pharmacies and provides copay assistance if necessary so that they can continue to receive important prescriptions; and the Okra Project, a collective that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people by bringing home-cooked, healthy, culturally specific meals and other resources to Black Trans People wherever they can reach them. Brooklyn Poets will match the first $300 in donations and all donations will be split evenly among the three orgs.
About our featured poets:
Xandria Phillips is a writer, educator and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xandria has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Their poetry has been featured in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and BOMB. Xandria’s poem “For a Burial Free of Sharks” won the GIGANTIC Sequins Poetry Contest judged by Lucas de Lima. Xandria’s chapbook Reasons for Smoking won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Their first book, HULL, was published by Nightboat Books in 2019 and was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Trans Poetry as well as a finalist for the Believer Book Award.
Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium and the full-length collections The Renunciations (forthcoming) and Bestiary, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review and Foglifter.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an artist whose most recent collection of poetry and photography is Seeing the Body (Norton, 2020). Her other books include Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books, 2010); The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011); Mule & Pear (New Issues, 2011), selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association; and Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, Guernica and many other publications. Griffiths is widely known for her literary portraits, fine art photography, and lyric videos. Her extensive video project P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), an intimate series of micro-interviews gathering nearly 100 contemporary poets in conversation, is featured online by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in New York City.
Live closed captioning will be available during the event. To request additional accommodations or more information, please contact Jason Koo.
Note that by attending our events, you agree to the terms of our code of conduct. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of this code. Thank you for respecting our community.
