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14th Annual Westchester Poetry Festival with Anastacia-Renee, Suzanne Frischkorn, Rodney Leonard, Laura Newbern, & Leah Umansky
April 6 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Free – $50.00
Please join Jennifer Franklin & Darren Wood as they welcome five amazing poets to The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry for the 14th annual Westchester Poetry Festival. The readings will begin at 1pm and will end at 4. The event is free and open to the public. Any donations towards the honoraria for the six poets are deeply appreciated. The event will take place at The Estherwood Mansion.
Anastacia-Renee (She/They) is a queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, speaker and podcaster. She is the author of (v.) (Black Ocean) and Forget It (Black Radish) and, Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere and Sidenotes from the Archivist forthcoming from Amistad (an imprint of HarperCollins). They were selected by NBC News as part of the list of “Queer Artists of Color Dominate 2021’s Must See LGBTQ Art Shows.” Anastacia-Renee was former Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019), Hugo House Poet-in-Residence (2015-2017), Arc Artist Fellow (2020) and Jack Straw Curator (2020). Her work has been anthologized in: Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature, Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, Furious Flower Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Afrofuturism, Black Comics, And Superhero Poetry, Joy Has a Sound, Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden, and Seismic: Seattle City of Literature. Their work has appeared in, Hobart, Foglifter, Auburn Avenue, Catapult, Alta, Torch, Poetry Northwest, A-Line, Cascadia Magazine, Hennepin Review, Ms. Magazine and others. Renee has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Ragdale, Mineral School, and The New Orleans Writers Residency.
Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Fixed Star (JackLeg Press, 2022) a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist, as well as the books, Girl on a Bridge, and Lit Windowpane (both from Main Street Rag Press), and five chapbooks. She will be reading from her fourth book of poems, Whipsaw, Anhinga Press, 2024). She is the recipient of The Writer’s Center Emerging Writers Fellowship for her book Lit Windowpane, the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, and a 2023 SWWIM Residency Award at The Betsy. Her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Indiana Review, The Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Verse Daily, Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems,part of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet Series (Knopf), Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity University Press, 2020), NPR’s Poetry Moment podcast, and elsewhere. She has prose and poems forthcoming in A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers (University of Akron Press, 2024), Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024), Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology edited by Rigoberto González (2024), Salamander Magazine, and South Dakota Review. She is an editor at $ – Poetry Is Currency and serves on the Terrain.org editorial board.
Born in Nixburg, Alabama, Rodney Terich Leonard is the author of Sweetgum & Lightning (Four Way Books). He will be reading from his second collection, Another Land of My Body, (Four Way Books, March 2024). An Air Force veteran who served during the Gulf War, his society profiles and poems have appeared or are forthcoming inSouthern Humanities Review, Red River Review, The Huffington Post, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, Poems in the Afterglow, Poetry Foundation Online, The Southern Review, What Rough Beast, Four Way Review, The New York Times, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys… (anthology edited by Keith Boykin) and other publications. He holds degrees from The New School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Teachers College Columbia University. A Callaloo poetry fellow, he received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and currently lives in Manhattan.
Laura Newbern is the author of Love and the Eye, selected by Claudia Rankine for Kore Press. The recipient of a Writer’s Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, her second collection of poems, A Night in the Country, was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the Changes Book Prize (formerly The Bergman Prize). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Threepenny Review, Poetry, and The Georgia Review, among others. For nearly twenty years, she had made her living teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in writing and literature. She lives in Georgia and teaches at Georgia College and at Reinhardt University. She is a graduate of Concord Academy, Barnard College, New York University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Leah Umansky is the author of three collections, most recently, OF TYRANT, forthcoming with The Word Works in 2024. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, and American Poetry Review. Her new memoir, Delicate Machine, is an exploration of womanhood, hope, and heart in the face of grief and a global pandemic.