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An Afternoon to celebrate new poetry collections with Randall Mann, Glenis Redmond, Enzo Silon Surin, and Dustin Brookshire, & Courtney LeBlanc (via Zoom)
July 16 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Free – $100.00
Join Jennifer Franklin, Program Director & Sophia Bannister, Programming Assistant & Social Media Director, as we welcome Randall Mann, Glenis Redmond, Enzo Silon Surrin, and Courtney LeBlanc to read and discuss their new poetry collections.
NB: This reading will take place on Zoom. The link will be sent to the email that you use to register as soon as you reserve a spot. (Please check your spam folder and save the link to your calendar.) It will also be sent to you the day of the reading for your convenience.
A queer poet, critic, and medical writer, Randall Mann is the author of five poetry collections: Complaint in the Garden, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, Straight Razor, Proprietary, and A Better Life. He is also the author of a book of criticism, essays, and interviews, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry. His writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Lit Hub, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry and the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry, and his books have been shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, California Book Award, and Northern California Book Award. Mann lives in San Francisco. One of our leading American practitioners of poetic form and liberating constraint, Randall Mann has confronted what it means to identify as multiracial and queer in urban America for thirty years. Deal: New and Selected Poems harnesses five previous volumes and includes economical yet expansive new works rooted in an age of Wi-Fi, apps, and chat notifications. Whether writing a sestina in the voice of the mortician of the murderer of Harvey Milk, or a deeply moving pantoum elegizing bullied gay adolescents who committed suicide, formal invention for Mann remains intensely personal. This collection—erotic, mournful, and often satirical—characteristically undermines, even as it enlarges, a use of language that continues to fail us. Timestamped by surprise and exhaustion, and filled with the everyday indignities of being alive, Deal: New and Selected Poems affirms Randall Mann, in the words of Garth Greenwell, as “among our finest, most skillful poets of love and ruin.”
Glenis Redmond is an award-winning poet. Her book, The Listening Skin (Four Way Books, 2022) was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. She has been a literary community leader for almost thirty years. She is a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist and a Cave Canem alum. Glenis has been the mentor poet for the National Student Poets Program since 2014. In the past she prepared these exceptional youth poets to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House. She is a North Carolina Literary Fellowship recipient and helped to create the first Writer-in-Residence position at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Her work has been showcased on NPR and PBS and has been most recently published in Orion Magazine and the New York Times. In 2020, Glenis received the highest art award in the state of South Carolina: the Governor’s Award. She will be inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors this spring. She believes poetry is the mouth that speaks when all other mouths are silent.
Enzo Silon Surin is an award-winning Haitian-born poet, educator, publisher, and social advocate. They are the author of three previous collections of poetry, including When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry. They are co-editor of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience (Cherry Castle Publishing, 2022), and the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation, a PEN New England Discovery Award (Celebrated New Voice in Poetry), and a 2020 Denis Diderot Grant as an Artist-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux in France. Their fourth collection of poems, American Scapegoat, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in Summer 2023. Surin’s work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls “broken spaces” and has been featured in numerous publications including by the Poetry Foundation, and in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets. Their librettos have been commissioned by the Boston Opera Collaborative for a project titled “Love in the Time of…”, which is based on Robert Schumann’s masterpiece song cycle Dichterliebe, and their 10-minute play “Last Train” was adapted as a 10-minute opera and is scheduled for production in 2023.
Dustin Brookshire (he/him) is the author of the chapbooks Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021), and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). He is also the co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023). His work has earned him both Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, has been published in numerous publications, and has been anthologized in Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012) and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writes on the American South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Dustin is the curator of the Wild and Precious Life Series, founder/editor of Limp Wrist, founding chapter president of the South Florida Poets (a chapter of the Florida State Poetry Association), program director for Reading Queer, and a founding member of FLAWN (Florida Local Artist and Writers Network). Find him online at dustinbrookshire.com.
Courtney LeBlanc is author of the full length collections Her Whole Bright Life, winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize (Write Bloody, 2023), Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart (Riot in Your Throat, 2021), and Beautiful & Full of Monsters (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020). She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press, and is a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (2022)