September 15, 2022, Room 31 NYC, 7:30 PM

Readings by: Grisel Y. Acosta, Dorothy Barnhouse, Grace Jahng Lee, and Thea Matthews

Music by: Rili Newman

Rili (pronounced Riley) Newman is a non-binary violinist and songwriter from Juneau Alaska. Their artistic endeavors span many disciplines, having film compositions featured in the San Fransisco Dance Film Festival, Greenpoint Film Festival and more. Their stage work has included such roles as The Conductor of the Polar Express, Jack Merridew in Lord of the Flies, and Captain Hook. They have contributed violin to artists such as Toledo, Robert Leslie, and Evan Crommett, Alegba and Friends, Chase Ceglie and more. They are currently working on a set of original tunes to be played with a full band in venues around NYC and Brooklyn.

Grisel Y. Acosta is an Afro-Latinx, queer, full professor at the City University of New York-BCC, where she teaches Latinx literature and creative writing. Her book, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, was a 2020 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist, and was published by Get Fresh Books in 2021. She is also the editor of the Routledge anthology, Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity, which features work by over 30 Latinx contributors. Select creative work can be found in Best American Poetry; The Baffler; Gathering of the Tribes Magazine; The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry; Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology; Acentos Review; and Platform Review. Dr. Acosta is a Geraldine Dodge Poetry Fellow, a Macondo Fellow, and Creative Writing Editor for Chicana/Latina Studies Journal.

Dorothy Barnhouse is a writer, editor, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her work has been honored by grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and MacDowell. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose, The Los Angeles Review, The Adirondack Review, and the Lindenwood Review. 

Born stateless in Seoul, Grace Jahng Lee’s writing has been supported by VONA, Kundiman, Yaddo, the Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Jerome Foundation, among others. She is a contributing editor at Guernica, the nonfiction and health editor at Hyphen, an AAWW Open City fellow, and the 2022 Bread Loaf Bakeless Nason Nonfiction Award recipient. She is working on a novel and an essay collection. Twitter: @gracejahnglee

Thea Matthews is a poet, author, and educator originally from San Francisco, California. She earned her BA in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; and holds an MFA in creative writing – poetry from New York University. Her poetry has appeared in Southern Indiana Review, the Rumpus, Tahoma Literary Review, Foglifter Journal, The New Republic, Green Mountains Review, and others. Her collaboration with micro press & reading series Red Light Lit resulted in the publication of Unearth [The Flowers] in 2020; and the poetry collection was listed as part of Kirkus Reviews’s Best Indie Poetry of 2020. Currently, Thea serves as the Donald Everett Axinn Fellow at the Academy of American Poets; and teaches craft seminars, as well as workshops, at the Writing Salon.