JAC OutLoud: Poetry Reading
Saturday, April 20, 2024
3—5 pm
$5 General Admission
Free Admission for Students
In celebration of National Poetry Month, four acclaimed poets will read from their selected works:
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow
Tina Cane, Rhode Island Poet Laureate, Emerita (2016—2024)
Colin Channer, Current Rhode Island Poet Laureate (2025—2030)
Michael Klein, Two time Lambda Literary Award recipient for poetry
Readers will be introduced by Jared White, co-owner of Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop. An open discussion with the audience will follow the readings.
ABOUT THE POETS
LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM:
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.
Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their most recent full length poetry book, Negative Money, was published in 2023. Their new chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland and are a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant recipient.
TINA CANE:
Tina Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island (2016-2024) where she is the founder/director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. In her capacity as poet laureate, Cane has established her state's first youth poetry ambassador program in partnership with Rhode Island Center for the Book, and has brought the Poetry-in-Motion program from the New York City Transit System to Rhode Island's state-wide buses.
Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought, Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz (Skillman Books, 2016), Once More With Feeling (Veliz Books 2017), Body of Work (Veliz Books, 2019), and Year of the Murder Hornet (Veliz Books, 2022). In 2016, Tina received the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry, from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She was also a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Her debut novel-in-verse for young adults, Alma Presses Play (Penguin/Random House) was released in September 2021. Cane is also the creator/ curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread, and the editor of Poetry is Bread: The Anthology (forthcoming from Nirala Press, 2023).
COLIN CHANNER:
Colin Channer is Rhode Island’s next poet laureate (2025-2030) and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown. Born in Jamaica, he was educated there and in New York. His ten books as fiction writer and poet include Console, published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 and a Finalist for a New England Book Award, Console uses dub reggae as an operational metaphor.
In it, poems cross-fade from Rhody to the Berkshires, from there to the Caribbean, blending Connecticut and Senegal and photography with text in ways that gesture to historical rebound. The recipient of a 2023 Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers magazine and a 2022 Lewis and Dorothy Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, Colin remains grateful to the editors of The The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Agni, Conjunctions, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly, Britain’s Poetry Review and other venues for publishing his work.
MICHAEL KLIEN:
Michael Klein has written five books of poetry and two books of autobiographical non-fiction. His honors include a fellowship from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and winning a Lambda Literary Award twice for poetry. His newest book is The Early Minutes of Without: New and Selected Poems. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Binghamton University and for more than 20 years, was on the MFA-in-Writing faculty at Goddard College and is currently teaching for College Unbound. He lives in Newport, RI, and you can find him virtually at michaelklein.substack.com.