This event is co-hosted with the NEOMFA Visiting Writers Series

Robyn Schiff is the author of four poetry collections: Worth (University of Iowa Press, 2002), Revolver (University of Iowa Press, 2008), A Woman of Property (Penguin, 2016), and most recently, Information Desk: An Epic, released by Penguin in August 2023. A professor at the University of Chicago, Schiff co-edits Canarium Books, an independent small press dedicated to publishing exceptional books of poetry, and was the recipient of the 2023 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. Her work has been published in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her family. 

Alyssa Perry is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of Oily Doily (Bench Editions, 2024). Her writing appears with Annulet, The Canary, Fence, Mercury Firs, River Styx, the Experimental Sound Studio, and other venues. Perry is poetry editor at the Cleveland Review of Books and an editor at Rescue Press. She teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art. 

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer writer and sound artist. His most recent books are I want to start by saying (CSU Poetry Center, 2024), Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), and Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna*). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems that Matter Most, Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, Fence, BathHouse, The Texas Review, Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry, Best American Experimental Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies.

Julie Patton is the author of The Flower Poem (Tender Buttons) and Teething on Type (Rodent Press). A special issue of Chicago Review devoted to Julie’s poetic/performative/visual and land main/tenance project launches October 2024. Her work has appeared in About Place Journal, ((eco (lang)(uage(reader)),  Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, and the seminal Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Julie is a recipient of a 2012 Doan Brook Association Watershed Hero Award, the Cleveland Arts Prize, a Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core Resident Fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her sound/text installation, Womb Room Tomb, was a 2018 Front Triennial hit. Julie, a sound-poet that composes with non-conventional instruments, has performed at Arts for Arts, the Stone, Artists Space, Center for Book Arts in NYC and in other noted venues here and abroad. She enjoys collaborating with Abou Farman, Janice Lowe, drummer Nasheet Waits. An award-wining educator,  Julie has taught at NYU, the Jack Kerouac School/Naropa, Schule fur Dichtung, and in her own backyard. Wherever that may be. 

Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi and is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. His poems are featured in Poetry magazine, the Kenyon Review, A Public Space, American Poetry Review and elsewhere. He is a winner of the 2022 Orison Poetry Prize, the Gordon Square Review Contest, finalist for Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and several others. He is the author of Harp in a Fireplace (Newfound, 2021) and Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile (Black Ocean Press, 2022).

Stella Corso is the author of Green Knife (Rescue Press, 2023) and TANTRUM (Rescue Press, 2017) along with chapbooks Taboo Vivant (Blush, 2022) and Wind & the Augur (Sixth Finch, 2021). She is a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets Theater (CRVPT) and is currently the Managing Editor of Denver Quarterly. 

Xavier Cavazos is a performance artist and a grand slam champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in NYC, and a member of three national poetry slam teams. He is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Barbarian at the Gate (Poetry Society of America), Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube Press), and The Devil’s Workshop (editor’s choice selection from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center). Currently, Cavazos is a senior poetry editor for Poetry Northwest, directs the Liberal Studies Program at Central Washington University, and serves on the board of trustees for Humanities Washington.

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa (2022). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music venue 2220arts and writes for LA Times’s Image Magazine, 4Columns, and The New Yorker among other publications. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press, and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and a memoir, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects. Her first solo exhibition for The Kitchen follows her participation in LA’s Made in LA biennial in 2020/21, for which she wrote a play turned film entitled God’s Suicide that chronicled James Baldwin’s several suicide attempts throughout his life. Black Backstage will pick up on years of writing, research, and personal engagement around black performance culture and take some of her writing about the unseen aspects of this cultural inheritance off the page.

Melissa Dickey is the author of Ordinary Entanglement (CSU Poetry Center, 2023), as well as two previous books of poems, Dragons and The Lily Will, both from Rescue Press. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Bennington Review, The Spectacle, the Laurel Review, jubilat, Puerto del Sol, and Kenyon Review Online, among other publications. She has received fellowships from the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Iowa Board of Regents, and the James A. Michener Center for Writers. Born and raised in New Orleans, she now lives in Western Massachusetts, where she teaches high school English and parents her four children.

Rennie Ament is the author of Mechanical Bull (CSU Poetry Center, 2023). Her work has appeared in West Branch, The Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Maine.