Henk Rossouw’s book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in their boxset New-Generation African Poets: Tano. Poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. An assistant professor, Henk teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is from South Africa.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of The Fluency of Light (2013) and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (2017). Her most recent book of essays was nominated for the University of Iowa’s Essay Prize and won the CLMP Firecracker Award for nonfiction. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan.

S2EP02 | featuring words from/

Emily Pettit — EMILY PETTIT is a poet, artist, editor and teacher, and the author of Goat in the Snow & Blue Flame. She has taught and lectured at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, the University of Massachusetts, Elms College, and Smith College. Emily is an editor for Factory Hollow Press and jubilat.

Alyssa Perry — ALYSSA PERRY lives in Cleveland and Iowa City. She teaches writing at Cleveland State University and the Cleveland Institute of Art, and serves as assistant editor with Rescue Press. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Poetry Northwest, West Branch Wired, and other journals.

Raja Freeman — RAJA FREEMAN is a performance poet, visual artist, and flautist. She has worked with Twelve Literary Arts as an intern, a member of the Six of Twelve Youth Performance Poetry Ensemble, and a two year member of the One Mic Open Youth Poetry Slam Team. She is currently a student at Cleveland State University and she hates writing bios.

Caryl Pagel — CARYL PAGEL is the author of the forthcoming book of prose Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (FC2, fall 2020) as well as two collections of poetry, Twice Told (University of Akron reprint, 2019), and Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death (Factory Hollow, 2012). Pagel is a co-founder and editor of Rescue Press and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She is an assistant professor at Cleveland State University, where she teaches poetry and nonfiction in the NEOMFA program.

BRNHSjournal.co

Cleveland Loves U! is a half-day house festival in honor of National Poetry Month

open mics! workshops! the workbench! readings!

join BARNHOUSE in celebrating National Poetry Month the only way we know how.

drink, eat, be merry, celebrate writing.

schedule:

6-7 | Writing Workshops
fiction, nonfiction, & poetry workshops by JDavid, Matt Mitchell, Alex DiFrancesco, & more

7-8 | the WORKBENCH ft JDavid (open mic to follow)
the WORKBENCH is a poetry-in-concert series. think NPR’s Tiny Desk, but for poetry.

8-9 | Cleveland Loves U! reading

emcee: Kevin Latimer

readers:

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and TriQuarterly. Her work has been selected for Best New Poets, the Williams Carlos Williams University Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and New South’s Poetry Prize. Julia is the editor of Construction Magazine(www.constructionlitmag.com) and writes a blog about motherhood (https://otherwomendonttellyou.wordpress.com/).

Courtney Ebert is in her second year of the NEOMFA program at Cleveland State. She was a finalist for the Gordon Square Review fiction contest in 2018, and she is trying her hardest, ok?

Amber Taliancich is the Co-founder and Essay Editor for Sidereal Magazine. She also teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University, as well as is the Program Coordinator for the NEOMFA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Entropy, Gigantic Sequins, Hobart, The Pinch, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She lives in Lakewood, OH.

Zach Peckham is a writer and musician from Central Massachusetts who left
his perfectly good marketing job to study poetry in Cleveland, Ohio. He works at the CSU Poetry Center and is a student in the NEOMFA.

cost: FREE! (donations accepted at the door)
location: 1484 E. 105th Street, Cleveland, OH 44106

BRNHSjournal.co

Please join us for a reading and reception celebrating the release of Leila Chatti’s first full-length collection of poetry, DELUGE.

In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as “flooding.” DELUGE mines Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both.

Leila Chatti is the inaugural Annisfield-Wolf Fellow in Editing & Writing, and is the author of the chapbooks Eb and Tunsiya/Amrikiya. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.