Jennifer Franklin and Sophia Bannister will host an online event featuring poets Tiana Clark, Shanta Lee, and Ruben Quesada as they read from their latest collections.
Tiana Clark, the author of Scorched Earth (Simon & Schuster, March 5, 2025), will be joining the event. Clark’s earlier works include I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is the recipient of several prestigious honors, including the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University and the 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. She also won the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize and received the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. Clark has earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and a BA from Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and Women’s Studies. Clark’s work has been featured in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, among other prominent publications. She currently teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters and is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Clark is working on her upcoming memoir-in-essays, Begging to be Saved, which explores themes of Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art, and survival.
Shanta Lee, an award-winning artist, is known for her work across multiple mediums, including photography, writing, and curating. Her new poetry collection, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It…The Slaughter (Small Harbor Publishing), was released in July 2024. Lee’s earlier works include GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, which won the 2020 Diode Editions full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Her collection Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023) was a finalist for the Hudson Prize and was longlisted for the Idaho Poetry Prize. Black Metamorphoses also inspired a multimedia exhibition at the Newport Art Museum titled See Me, Read Me, Hear Me: An Immersion of Black Metamorphoses. Lee’s latest exhibition, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, has been showcased at the Southern Vermont Arts Center and the Fleming Museum of Art. The most recent installment of the exhibition, Dark Goddess: Sacroprofanity (Volume III of the Dark Goddess series), was presented at the Bennington Museum in 2024.
Ruben Quesada, a poet, translator, and editor, will also read at the event. He edited the acclaimed anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. Quesada’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Believer, and Harvard Review. His upcoming poetry collection, Brutal Companion, won the Barrow Street Editors Prize and is set for publication in autumn 2024.
This event promises to be a celebration of new voices and fresh perspectives in contemporary poetry.
