Founded, curated, and hosted by Sarah Browning and Raina J. León at Young American Cider in Philadelphia

Founded, curated, and hosted by Sarah Browning and Raina J. León at Young American Cider in Philadelphia

This Book Release Party celebrates the release of Gabriel Ramirez’s inaugural chapbook “If Pit Bulls had a God It’d Be a Pit Bull,” published by local women-owned bookstore and small press, The Head & The Hand as part of the Riverwards Chapbook Series, which was supported by Penn Treaty Special Services District and PECO Powering the Arts! The program includes a poetry showcase of the author’s closest friends and colleagues as well as a reading of the chapbook by Gabriel Ramirez. The author will also have a book signing before and after the readings. All artists, including the DJ who is also performing a song, have volunteered their time and artistry.

Event Schedule

7:00-7:30 PM:

• DJ Set

• Book Purchasing

7:30-8:30PM: Featured Performances

• CVGEBIRD

• Malaya Ulan (Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate)

• Shame-e-Ali Nayeem

• Kirwyn Sutherland

• Raina Leon

• Sanam Sheriff

• Hiwot Adilow

• Tafisha Edwards

• Kingsley Ibeneche (DJ + vocal artist)

• Saskia (Host)

8:30-9:00PM: Author Reading: Gabriel Ramirez

9:00-9:30PM: Book Signing and Fellowship

The Late(ish) Poetry Show is back. It's the day after halloween so in addition to our amazing feature, expect some spooky poetry games, prizes for best costume and some other surprises. Where else can you experience genre bending, incredible poetry and Halloween fun in one night? 
A limited amount of VIP (Very into poetry) tickets are available here.

 With a VIP ticket you get:

• Seat in the first rows reserved until 8:25

• Limited edition poetry print

• Skip the line

Nothing makes Friday feel sooner than good plans. VIP tickets are selling fast. Get yours now.

Join us this Friday for a special Halloween edition of The Late(ish) Poetry Show. 

Full schedule here

Your legacy does not start in death; your legacy starts now! Consider how often you have learned about a remarkable facet of a beloved’s life after transitioning. Wouldn’t you have wanted to be able to ask them some questions? This session is designed to start a conversation with our clients/consumers, family members, and ourselves about the legacy that they/we want to leave behind when they can ask questions and make plans about it. Specifically, what lessons, words of wisdom, and family stories do you want to share with those within your beloved communities? What legacies do you want to leave those who live on after you? What do you want to happen to your possessions after your death, and how will others know why they are treasured in the first place? This session is not so much about the monetary value of things but about discussing what is important and meaning making while the opportunity still exists. The audience for this session is social workers, geriatric care managers, therapists, family caregivers, and those who are beginning to explore their own legacy, essentially everyone.

Learning Objectives Participants in this workshop will:

• Understand that beginning the process of legacy building involves self-exploration.

• Utilize tools and specific resources like the genogram as part of storytelling, to understand the past, and present, and plan for the future.

• Plan to share one story about a treasured item that reveals part of your own legacy to your beloved family.

• Add to a list of questions to guide conversations around planning for where one’s most precious possessions should be placed when a major life transition occurs.

• Identify some community-based resources that can receive items that may interest community-held archives.

Dr. Norma Thomas received her bachelor’s degree in social work from Penn. State University. She then went on to obtain her master’s degree in social work from Temple University’s School of Social Administration and her doctorate degree in social work from UPENN. Dr. Thomas began as the MSW Program Director at California University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2007 and retired in January 2017. She was promoted to full professor in 2014. From 1994-2004 she worked for the Widener University Center for Social Work Education where she achieved tenure as an Associate Professor, also holding positions as Assistant Director and Baccalaureate Program Director. She worked from 1975-1984 for the Delaware County Office on Services for the Aging and from 1984-1992 for the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging. In addition, she was the co-founder and President of the Center on Ethnic & Minority Aging, Inc., Philadelphia, PA from 1995-2008. She is currently an online instructor for the Center For Social Work Education, Widener University.

Dr. Raina J. Leon, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Canto Mundo and Macondo, has been published in over 100 publications in poetry, fiction, nonfiction and academic scholarship. She is currently a full professor of education in the Kalmanovitz School of Education at St. Mary’s College of California. She came to St. Mary’s from the Department of Defense Education Activity, where for three years she taught military dependents in Bamberg, Germany. Leon received her BA in Journalism from Pennsylvania State University with minors in African American Studies, English, International Studies and Spanish, graduating with honors in English with a poetry manuscript supervised by Dr. William J Harris and Dr. Aldon Nielsen; MA in Teaching of English from Teachers College Columbia University; MA in Educational Leadership from Framingham State University; and PhD in Education under the Culture, Curriculum and Change strand at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She recently completed her MFA in Poetry at St. Mary’s College of California.

Founded, curated, and hosted by Sarah Browning and Raina J. León at Young American Cider in Philadelphia

This month we feature Sonia Sanchez, Carmen Calatayud, and Roberto Carlos Garcis

Join Black Lawrence Press authors and Owen Lyman-Schmidt for live music & multi-genre readings!

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13TH
6-9PM
NO COVER // FREE FUN

Reading Lineup:

Max McDonough
Alexandra Naughton
Raina J. León
 +Live music with Owen Lyman-Schmidt from Driftwood Soldier

***

What’s Up at TMoms:

• Sundays, All Day Long | Craft Sundays at TMoms? BACK. Googly eyes? BACK. Coloring pages? BACK? Your creative spirit? BACK. Come thru every Sunday for FREE arts & crafts upstairs and downstairs at Tattooed Mom!

• Daily Happy Hour | All drafts are just $4 every day from 4-6pm!

• Daily Menu | Tattooed Mom will also be serving tasty eats and ice cold drinks all evening.

• Upstairs dining, bar access, and event entry is 21+ w/ valid ID.

• Accessibility at TMoms | Due to the construction of our historical building, Tattooed Mom is only partially accessible. Our event space is on the second floor, which is only accessible via a flight of stairs (20 steps, 3 feet wide, railing on the left side only). For more information, please visit our Accessibility page.

Raina J. León, Sami Miranda, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, and Malcolm Friend read at the American Poetry Museum, drawing from work in The Acentos Review in anticipation of the Acentos Quince Anthology.

Furious Flower schedule

Who cut the path that we follow and when must we cut our own?  Who was it who preserved the sweetness of the waters that we drink and what do we do with the poison we inherit?  How do we discover our stories and bring them into an embodied and present truth?  In this panel, the poets, Raina J. León, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Roberto Carlos García, and Malcolm Friend reflect on their literary and familial ancestors, how the past infuses their work, and what they are doing in this moment to extend and create new legacies worthy of remembrance and stewardship through writing in response to the archive of memory and document.  The poets assembled are founders of publications, podcasts, and institutes, innovators across artistic media, mentors and educators, contributors to the literary field in ways that have not existed before them.  The future of Afro-Latinx creatives will be exponentially different and more powerfully known and that comes from a distinct consciousness of one’s place within a larger story, one that knows that our ancestors survived for our thriving, their seeded and ceded a way for our furious flowering.  

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). The author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self, she publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She has received fellowships with the Obsidian Foundation, Macdowell, Anaphora, VONA, Cave Canem, Macondo, CantoMundo among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022) & Migrant Psalms (Northwestern Press, 2021). Holnes is an Afro-Panamanian American writer, performer, and educator. His writing has been published in English, Spanish, and French in literary journals, anthologies, and other books worldwide and online. He also writes for the stage. Most of his writing centers on love, family, race, immigration, and joy. He works as a college professor in New York City, NY. 

Roberto Carlos Garcia was born in Harlem, New York, and he writes about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-Diasporic experience. His work has been published widely in places like Poetry Magazine, NACLA, Poets & Writers, The Root, and others. Roberto is a 2023 New Jersey State Council of the Arts Poetry Fellow.

He is the author of five books. Four poetry collections: Melancolía (Cervena Barva Press, 2016), black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric (Willow Books, 2018), [Elegies] (FlowerSong Press, 2020), What Can I Tell You: Selected Poems (Flowersong Press, 2022), and one essay collection, Traveling Freely, forthcoming in 2024 from Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press. 

Roberto is the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit.

Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University and his MFA from University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full-length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018), winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, and co-edited the anthology Até Mais: Latinx Futurisms (Deep Vellum, 2024). Together with JR Mahung he is a member of Black Plantains, an Afrocaribbean poetry collective. He currently lives and teaches in Austin, TX.

Furious Flower

10am-12pm, Memorial Hall Auditorium, James Madison University
James Madison University College of Education presents Teaching the Worlds of Black Poetry to High School Students
Panel for Educators: Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Hayes Davis, Brian Hanon, TJ Hendrix, Dave Wooley, Mary Beth Cancienne (Moderator)
 Workshop Leaders for Students: Glenis Redmond, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Raina J. Léon, DaMaris Hill, Derrick Weston Brown

Monday Poets 30th Anniversary Season: Michele Belluomini and Raina J. León

Mon, September 16, 2024 6:00 p.m.Add to your calendar
Literature Department at Parkway Central Library

Join the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Literature Department in celebrating the 30th Anniversary season of Monday Poets. This year’s theme is Sankofa (SAHN-koh-fah), a Twi word from the Akan Tribe of Ghana which loosely implies that to move forward, one must “go back and get it”. In that spirit we will be celebrating at each event a past Monday Poet and introduce a new one. Each month from September 2024 to April 2025 a new Sankofa pair will read at a new library. Monday Poets exists to inspire and connect poets and community members across the city of Philadelphia.

This program will take place in the Skyline Room on the 4th Floor of Parkway Central and is free and open to the public. The event will be led by Philadelphia's current Poet Laureate, Kai Davis. 

Previous Monday Poet: Michele Belluomini

Michele Belluomini’s poetry has been published in many print and online journals, and in various anthologies. Her chapbook, Crazy Mary & Others was a winner in the first Plan B Press competition. Her most recent volume of poetry is Signposts for Sleep Walkers. She was one of the winners of the 12th Annual John and Rose Petracca & Family Award for her poem, "La Befana." She works as Adjunct Library Faculty at Community College of Philadelphia.

New Monday Poet: Raina J. León

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn,sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She currently supports poets and writers as faculty at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine.

With Sarah Browning, Raina León founded, curates, and hosts, Wild Indigo Poetry Reading Series at Young American Cider.

DENICE FROHMAN is a poet and performer from New York City. She has received support from The Pew Center for the Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poem-A-Day (The Academy of American Poets), The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Currently, she is developing her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, which centers the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders.

GABRIEL RAMIREZ is a Queer Afro-Latinx poet, activist, and teaching artist. Gabriel has received fellowships from The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, CantoMundo and Callaloo. Gabriel’s electrifying writing and performance are catalysts towards healing and brings awareness to mental health, Afro-Latinidad, the African Diaspora, self love, masculinity, and social change.  Gabriel has performed on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre, United Nations, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theatre and other venues & universities around the nation. Gabriel was featured in Huffington Post, VIBE Magazine, Blavity, Upworthy, The Flama, and Remezcla. Gabriel’s work has also appeared in anthologies like Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017), What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019) and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020) Follow Gabriel @RamirezPoet and RamirezPoet.com.

Char & Stave reading in Ardmore series run by Chris DeMento

More information to come.

Photo by Tammy Chan on Unsplash

I’ll be joining Heid Erdrich, Rick Barot, Jonathan Farmer, and Solmaz Sharif as one of the judges for the National Book Awards in Poetry. Our work will be complete and we will just be celebrating the amazing work that we had the honor of reading this year! My mother, Dr. Norma D. Thomas, will be accompanying me!

¿Y dónde está mi gente?: An Evening with Three Afro-Latina Poets

Tues. Oct. 17 th , 6-7:30 pm

20 Cooper Square

Co-sponsored by the Dept of Art & Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts and The Latinx

Project at NYU with support from Some Contemporary Poetries, NYU English Dept and

Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts

6:10 pm:

Welcome: T. Urayoan Noel, The NYU Latinx Project – 5 min.

Introductions: Solena Ornelas, Masters student, Dept of Art & Public Policy – 7 min.

Poets: Jasminne Mendez, Yesenia Montilla, Raina Leon: 15 min. each (order to be specified

after conferring with poets)

Dialogue moderator: Pato Hebert 15- 20 min. including questions from the floor

Followed by book signing and reception.

https://tisch.nyu.edu/art-public-policy/events/-y-donde-esta-mi-gente---an-evening-with-three-afro-latina-poets

With Jasminne Mendez and Yesenia Montilla, we are on the road again with the Tres Leches/Tres Golpes tour, this time offering a collective reading and writing prompts in the Bloom Writers community. 12:30-4pm EST.

Latinx Heritage Month Final Showcase that is scheduled for Friday, October 13th from 5 - 8pm in Kagin Ballroom Second Floor. 

Final Schedule

5-5:25 Twin Cities Latin Band 

5:30-5:40 LSU Co-Chairs Opening Remarks 

5:40-6 Alicia Severiano Folklorio Performance (Student Performance)

6:05-6:25 Dr. Gonzalo Guzman Speech (Macalester Professor Speaker)

6:25-6:35 INTERMISSION

6:40-7:00 Grupo de Danzas Colombianas  

7:05-7:25 Edwin Torres, Vice President of Public Affairs at NewPublica 

7:30-8 Raina Leon, Professor and Poet

*The 5 minute spaces are for set up and set down and/or MCS introduction for next performer*

Creative Writing Workshops and dynamic reading at Texas A&M College Station

(Play and Writing the Self)

Back to Elementary

The most incredibly brilliant divergent thinkers are not in boardrooms; they are in daycare, preschool, and lower elementary grades.  The rigors of schooling, researchers say, may free our minds in some ways while caging our imaginations.  It's time to go back to your elementary freedom.  In this workshop, we rediscover the generative magic of play through card games and physical activities (that can be adapted for accessibility).  Together we summon the wonder and innocence of childhood in order to see ourselves and our world as new.  We push aside the apologies that barb themselves within our throats.  We boldly face our shadow creature fears and find an invincibility even in the darkest memory.  We will draw our imagined heroes and those we love.  We will study the work of writers of color and queer writers have the dexterity to step back through time to reshape the world.  Ultimately, we will all come away with the foundations for transformational work by going back to elementary.  

Times in EST. Online Session

With the Blue Stoop

Photo by Tammy Chan on Unsplash

Reading in celebration of the book release of Remedies for Disappearing by Alexa Patrick with Haymarket Books.

Times are EST.

Photo by Katrin Hauf on Unsplash