PLEASE NOTE THAT FROM APRIL 2, OUR READING SERIES TIME CHANGES TO 3:00 - 5:00 PM
Featuring Brooklyn Poets Isabella DeSendi, Seth Leeper, Kyle Liang
Hosted by Thomas Fucaloro
Plus open mic
21+
$3 suggested donation. Two drink min, alcoholic or non.
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in Narrative, Leveler, Small Orange and other places. Her chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Most recently, she received a Poets & Writers BIPOC grant, and she has been named a finalist for the Frontier Digital Poetry Chapbook Award, the June Jordan Fellowship, Narrative’s Annual Poetry Prize and Palette’s Spotlight Award. Isabella holds an MFA from Columbia University and currently lives in New Jersey.
Seth Leeper is a queer poet. A 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, River Styx, The Journal, Salamander, EcoTheo Review, Pidgeonholes, and The Account. He holds an M.A. in Special Education from Pace University and B.A. in Creative Writing and Fashion Journalism from San Francisco State University. He lives and teaches in Brooklyn, NY. He tweets @sethwleeper.
Kyle Liang is the son of Taiwanese and Malaysian immigrants. He is the author of the chapbook HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE (winner of the 2017 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest), and his debut full-length collection, GOOD SON, will be forthcoming from Sundress Publications in early 2024. Kyle's work has appeared in Best of the Net, Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, wildness, Diode and elsewhere. He is an adjunct professor at Quinnipiac University, a teacher for Brooklyn Poets, and a physician assistant in internal medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell.
“Brooklyn Poets is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization celebrating and cultivating the poets, poetry and literary heritage of Brooklyn, the birthplace of American poetry.
That’s right, birthplace. If you believe, as we do, that with the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1855, American poetry was born, then Brooklyn, where that book was published by the Rome Brothers print shop on Old Fulton St, is where that took place.
Over the years, Brooklyn has served as home to and inspired some of the most original and influential poets on the world stage, from Whitman, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Audre Lorde and June Jordan in the American tradition to expatriate masters such as W. H. Auden and Joseph Brodsky; visiting visionaries such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Federico García Lorca; and hip-hop pioneers such as Big Daddy Kane, MC Lyte, Guru, MCA, Digable Planets, Biggie Smalls, Lil’ Kim, GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Jay Z.
Since our inception in 2012, our core program of small, intensive poetry workshops taught by award-winning poets has served over 2000 students and employed over 80 teachers, and we’ve grown to host 50 regular events per year (both in person and virtual) attracting over 3000 attendees annually, fostering a more homegrown, close-knit, diverse community of poets and readers than what we see traditionally offered by graduate writing programs and the American literary community at large. Our community extends through the Bridge, the world’s premier poetry network connecting poets and mentors.”