Join us at Equity Gallery on Sunday, May 19th, 3-5 PM, for an afternoon poetry reading curated by NEA Literature Fellow Maya Pindyck in conjunction with Carla Repice's solo exhibition, The White Problem. The reading will feature responses from five acclaimed poets, including Alondra Uribe, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Maya Pindyck, Sarah Riggs, and Vincent Toro.
About the Participants-
Born in Puerto Rico, Alondra Uribe is a 17 year old spoken word artist and acting major at Theater Arts Production Company school. She won first place in the 2016 BronxWrites slam and has been a member of the Bronx Poetry Project at DreamYard for four years. She was a participant in the Alice Hoffman Young Writer’s Retreat at Adelphi University, and was the guest poet for the “Teaching For Black Lives” panel at the Schomburg Center. Alondra has also been the keynote poet for the New York City Department of Education Chancellor Richard Carranza at Carnegie Hall. Most recently she was a member of the 2018 Urban Word slam team, competing at Brave New Voices in Texas and placing in the Top 20 of the best poetry teams internationally. In the fall of 2018, Alondra traveled to Japan for the International Poetry Exchange Program with Ambassador Caroline Kennedy. Alondra has been a member of the program for two years, sharing her work with partners in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. Alondra is always involved with her community and school, especially her high school musicals. She is currently rehearsing for “UrineTown The Musical” as Officer Lockstock.
Maya Pindyck examines intersections of memory, feeling, and cultural spaces. A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she is the author of the poetry collections Emoticoncert (Four Way Books, 2016) and Friend Among Stones (New Rivers Press, 2009), and a chapbook, Locket, Master (Poetry Society of America, 2006). She exhibits her interdisciplinary work widely and publishes her scholarship on creative practices, schooling, and social justice in various academic journals. In 2005, she co-founded an abortion story archive: Project Voice. Pindyck earned her PhD in English education from Columbia University's Teachers College, her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and her BA in studio art and philosophy from Connecticut College. She is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Writing Program at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and writer. She received the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of numerous fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Kimbilio, Cave Canem Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals including The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, Poets & Writers, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Writer’s Chronicle, Transition, American Poet, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and many others. Griffiths is widely known for her literary portraits, fine art photography, and lyric videos. Her extensive video project, P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), an intimate series of micro-interviews, gathers nearly 100 contemporary poets in conversation, and is featured online by the Academy of American Poets. In 2015, Griffiths was selected by the Poetry Society of America to curate the Poetry Walk, featuring the poetry of Octavio Paz, for the New York Botanical Garden's exhibit, Frida Kahlo: Art Garden Life. In 2011, Griffiths appeared in the first ever poetry issue of Oprah’s O Magazine. Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books 2010) and The Requited Distance (The Sheep Meadow Press 2011). Griffiths’ third collection of poetry, Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose 2011), was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her most recent full-length poetry collection is Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books 2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry. Currently, Griffiths lives in New York.
Sarah Riggs is a writer, artist, filmmaker and translator, www.sarahriggs.org. She has published poetry books with 1913 Press, Burning Deck, Reality Street, Ugly Duckling Presse, Chax, Editions de l’attente, and Le Bleu du Ciel as well as chapbooks with Belladonna* and Contrat Maint, and critical essays with Routledge. Forthcoming are paintings in collaboration with Emily Wallis Hughes’ book of poetry, Sugar Factory, with Spuyten Duyvil in 2018, a show of drawings for Laynie Browne’s Amulet Sonnets (forthcoming also as a book with Solid Objects) and translations of Etel Adnan’s Time from the French with Nightboat forthcoming 2019. Producer of The Tangier 8 and director of Six Lives, Riggs is currently working on a film of New York dancer choreographers including Daria Faïn, Emily Johnson, and Douglas Dunn. She has taught at Columbia and NYU in Paris, as well as Pratt in Brooklyn, and is working with Mirene Arsanios on the web publication of “Footprint Zero,”a project of especially New York and Morocco-based artists responding to the environmental crisis, for of the non-profit Tamaas, www.tamaas.org
Vincent Toro is the author of “Stereo.Island.Mosaic.,” which won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and The Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has an MFA in poetry from Rutgers University and is a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal. He is recipient of a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a NYFA Fellowship in Poetry, and the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. A two time Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize, the Alice James Book Award, the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, and the Cecile De Jongh Literary Prize, Vincent’s poems have been published in The Buenos Aires Review, Codex, Duende, The Acentos Review, The Caribbean Writer, Rattle, The Cortland Review, Vinyl, Saul Williams’ CHORUS, and Best American Experimental Writing 2015. Vincent was an artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida and at Can Serrat in Spain. He is a Macondo Foundation writer and a board member for GlobalWrites, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting literacy through technology. Vincent teaches at Bronx Community College, is Writing Liaison at Cooper Union’s Saturday Program, and is a poet in the schools for The Dreamyard Project and the Dodge Poetry Foundation.
If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP to info@nyartistsequity.org