REMINDER: [bklynpoetryoutreach] Brooklyn Poetry Outreach Festival
vigorito.anthony
Please help us celebrate National Poetry Month with our first ever Ken Siegelman's Brooklyn Poetry Outreach Festival at the Brooklyn Public Library on 6th Ave between 8th & 9th St in Park Slope.
When: Tuesday, April 18th
4:00-7:45 pm
Where: Brooklyn Public Library, Park Slope Branch
431 6th Ave, Brooklyn, NY (click for directions)
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1214952721950647/
Featuring:
Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina ChangJoe Louis Allen Jr. aka Joetry
Kim Darlene Brandon
Jay Chollick
Ricardo Hernandez
Omayma Khayat
Marion Palm
With musical interludes by Walker Hornung and friends
Open mic (time permitting)
Light refreshments will be served.
Brooklyn Poetry Outreach was the brainchild of Ken Siegelman and former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. Formed in 2002, the year Ken Siegelman was appointed Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. Ken Siegelman passed away in June of 2009, but his legacy lives on. Our first poetry festival is dedicated to the memory of Ken.
Tina Chang
Tina is the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. The first woman named to this position, she was raised in New York City. She is the author of the poetry collections “Half-Lit Houses” and “Of Gods & Strangers” (Four Way Books) and co-editor of the anthology “Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond” (W.W. Norton, 2008) along with Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar. Her poems have appeared in “American Poet”, “McSweeney’s”, “Ploughshares”, “The New York Times” among others.
Her work has also been anthologized in “Identity Lessons, Poetry Nation, Asian American Literature”, “Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation”, “From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems” and in “Poetry 30: Poets in Their Thirties”. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation among others.
She currently teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is an international faculty member at the City University at Hong Kong.
Joe Louis Allen Jr AKA Joetry
Joe is a native New Yorker from the hard streets of the South Bronx. Fort Apache is the stomping grounds that have nurtured this poet into the kind of brisk writing he has done over the years. Joe reveals the truth about life through his experiences and uncensored eyes. His first publication "Progression describes some of the milestones reached after his successful battle with drug addiction. His clinical death documented as 14 minutes in the fall of 1998 has him counting his blessings and projecting them towards others in his profession as a credentialed substance abuse counselor.
Kim Darlene Brandon
Kim was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY with her daughter. She is a professional storyteller who has written and performed her own stories in the African tradition for more ten years. She received her BA from Bernard M. Baruch College. She advanced her studies in fiction writing at the New School, attended The Women of Color Writing Workshops, the North Country Institute for Writers of Color Retreats at Medgar Evers College, the Hurston/Wright Workshop, and the New York Writers’ Coalition workshops. Kim is the founder of the Brooklyn Society Writers group. She has currently completed three novels and is in the process of bringing her first novel Baltimore City Blues to print. She is published in the anthology The Dream Catcher’s Song, the Peregrine Journal, “The Hawaiian Review, and soon to be published in “The Year of the Poet.”
Jay Chollick
The word’s most harmless terrorist; shadowy at the open mic; insufferable in print; bookish in slim volumes: “Colors”; “American Vesuvius”; “FiveO The Stately Poems”; “New from J”; “Facing the Elements”; prizes & awards but not the bluest ribbons; big mouth on the radio; a tv pipsqueak,for which only his one hand claps
Ricardo Hernandez
Ricardo was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 22, 1985. Enlisting after graduating from high school, Ricardo served in the U.S. Air Force with the 71st Fighter Squadron, also known as the Ironmen. After the military, and briefly living in Florida, Ricardo returned to Brooklyn where he would discover his hometown anew during his pursuit of becoming a poet.
Omayma Khayat
As a mother of 3 children, Omayma hardly finds time to concentrate on her writing. With a passion for the written word she sneaks away to get the creative juices flowing, whether it’s at a café or a park bench, she finds an escape. After joining a writing group, her passion for writing became reignited. After getting over her fear of speaking in front of people, she began reading her poetry at Boulevard Books open mic and almost three years later her writing has flourished.
In December 2013, she was a participant in the “Hope” event honoring Anne Frank at the Good Lutheran Church and has recently been reading at the “Speak the Truth” poetry event. Currently Omayma is working on her first two collections, "Fragments of an Identity" and "Forgotten Memories".
Her poetry speaks through various levels of truths; they are a way for her to search for her part in the world, to know where she belongs. With a cultural aspect, taking from being totally culturally confused she bleeds her soul onto paper to find her mark in the world.
Feeling at times stuck between two worlds, her poetry explores the tug and pull of her identity. Her poems, at times, are the legend to a map, an exploration of countless journeys throughout her existence to find the place where she belongs. Her search of where the X is, where her treasure is buried, where her identity is defined.
Marion Palm
Marion is a Brooklyn-born and raised poet and singer. She is the only child of Swedish immigrants and a first generation American. After living in corporate America, and graduating from the University of Minnesota, she spent five years establishing herself as a poet back home, and earned a master in the Parson’s Program at Bank Street College of Education. Marion co-founded Poets Under Glass, incorporated in 1987, which has produced monthly writing workshops, anthologies, radio and television shows, a newsletter, a guidebook, recitals and venue leaders with the help of competitive grants. Palm has authored six chapbooks and five non-fiction books and is currently poet in residence at St. Jacobi Lutheran Church, a tri-lingual ministry in Sunset Park, where she lives. Ken Siegelman chose Marion Palm, a fellow educator, to inaugurate Brooklyn Poetry Outreach and she considers it an honor to be invited to read for this first Ken Siegelman’s Brooklyn Poetry Festival. She will read poems from her thirty year retrospective, “Reflections”, which is a collection of her performance poems as a frequent featured reader on the NYC readings circuit.