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We, Too, Sing America: Celebrating Langston’s Legacy

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2017 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL EVENT. Find out what we’re up to during Brooklyn Book Festival here. 

Free with RSVP. 

PEN America and the I, Too, Arts Collective present an evening of poetry in the Langston Hughes brownstone in Harlem. Calling on talented poets from across New York City, this inter-generational event will feature 2016 NYC Youth Poet Laureate Nkosi Nkululeko and 2016 Queens Youth Poet Laureate Trace DePass, along with poets Ellen Hagan, Haydil Henriquez, and Vincent Toro, all of whom will bring Langston’s legacy to life: filling the brownstone with light, life, and poetry.

Ellen Hagan is a writer, performer, and educator. Her collections of poetry include: Crowned, Sawyer House Press 2010 and Hemisphere, Northwestern University Press, Spring 2015. Ellen’s poems and essays can be found on ESPNW, in the pages of Creative NonfictionUnderwired MagazineShe Walks in Beauty (edited by Caroline Kennedy), HuizacheSmall Batch, and Southern Sin

Haydil Henriquez is an arts educator, activist and poet born and raised in the South Bronx. Daughter of diligent Dominican parents, a taxi driver and a waitress with many dreams, she was raised to value her Caribbean culture and celebrate her black roots. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Education; throughout her college education she worked with displaced youth in Bogotá, Colombia coordinating and teaching summer workshop series’ on oral storytelling, spoken word poetry and women empowerment for a project called Taller de Paz. She joined the DreamYard Art Center team in 2014 as a Program Associate and now serves as the Co-Director of the DreamYard Art Center.

Nkosi Nkululeko is Callaloo and Poets House Fellow. A speaker for TEDxNewYork and Aspen Ideas Festival, he is a finalist for the 2016 Winter Tangerine Awards for Poetry, Best of the Net anthology, and nominee for the Pushcart Prize. His work is currently published in Pank, Apogee, VINYL, and other publications. Nkosi lives in Harlem, New York.

Trace Howard DePass is the 2016 Teen Poet Laureate for the Borough of Queens and editor of Scholastic’s Best Teen Writing of 2017. His work has been featured on BET Next Level, Billboard, Blavity, NPR’s The Takeaway, and also resides within literary homes – Entropy Magazine, Split This Rock!, The Other Side of Violet, & Penmanship’s East Coast Voices Anthology.

Vincent Toro is the author of STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC., which was awarded Ahsahta Press’s Sawtooth Poetry Prize and The Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has an MFA in poetry from Rutgers and is contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal. Vincent is recipient of a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, The Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, and the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. Vincent’s poems have been published in The Buenos Aires Review, Codex, Rattle, The Cortland Review, Vinyl, The Hawai’I Review, Washington Square Review, The Paterson Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2015. Vincent teaches at Bronx Community College, is writing liaison at The Cooper Union’s Saturday Program, and is a poet in the schools for The Dreamyard Project and the Dodge Poetry Foundation.