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PEN Live: Poetry in the Red Room

On Thursday, December 8, join PEN Live as poets Hanis-Willis Abdurraqib, Danniel Schoonebeek, and Vi Khi Nao read selections from new and recently published collections of poetry that grapple with resistance to systems of violence and oppression, censorship, late capitalism, lyric poetry, and even language itself. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, a conversation on what the next four years will demand of writers and how writers can continue to resist, oppose, and agitate will follow. The poets will discuss how they approach and implement forms of protest in their lives and other forms of art that inform their work. The audience is invited to join the conversation with a Q&A session afterwards.

PEN Live is a monthly series supporting PEN America’s mission to foster free expression through arts and literature. Through readings, performance and discussion, guests engage contemporary issues by approaching a central theme. Past PEN: Live speakers have discussed political satire, science fiction, translation and Prince.

Purchase tickets here!

 

Danniel Schoonebeek is the editor of the PEN Poetry Series. His first book of poems, American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014), was named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers and called “a groundbreaking first book that stands to influence its author’s generation” by Boston Review. His second collection of poems, Trébuchet, was a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in 2016. In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and beginning in late 2017 he will fulfill an eight-month residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Recent poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, Iowa Review, Fence, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. A recipient of awards and honors from Poets House, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Oregon State University, he hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Manhattan and Brooklyn. dannielschoonebeek.com

 

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing fellow, a writing fellow at Yale University, and a columnist for MTV News. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released by Button Poetry in 2016.

 

 

Vi Khi Nao is the author of novel, Fish in Exile, and poetry collection, The Old Philosopher. Vi’s work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the winner of 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2016 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest.