Location: Room 518, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

Are poems ever finished, or just abandoned? In this panel, five poets will explore the process of a single published poem, from initial inspiration and drafting, through the process of revision, and focus on the moment they decided their work was finished—if it ever was. Focusing on works that experienced deep and significant changes throughout their writing, this panel will explore the way revision can reveal hidden rooms within an initial draft, and examine the moments those revisions end.

Speakers: Megan Pinto, James Fujinami Moore, Diannely Antigua, Taneum Bambrick, Michael Dhyne

Location: Carl Hansen Student Center SC 120

The Latinx, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Northeastern University invites you to join a book talk and poetry reading featuring Sandra Guzmán, Diannely Antigua, María Clara Sharupi Jua, and Yvette Modestin and their compelling book, Daughters of Latin America.  The event will take place on Thursday, March 13th, 4:00-6:00PM, at Northeastern’s Alumni Center, 6th Floor, 716 Columbus Avenue, Boston. This is a FREE event! Register HERE!

FIESTA DE POETAS: A CELEBRATION OF LATINO POETRY

Room 2106 (Building 2, 1st Floor)

Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology edited by poet and critic RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ gathers more than 180 poets in Spanish and English spanning from the 17th century to the present. These poems bear witness to the beauty and power of this vibrant and expanding tradition: its profound engagement with pasts both mythical and historical, its reckoning with the complexities of language, land, and identity, and its vision of a nation enriched by the stories of immigrants, exiles, refugees, and their descendants.

Join us for an evening of poetry celebrating the richest, most revelatory collection of 21st-century Latino poetry ever published, followed by a dance party. Featuring DIANNELY ANTIGUA, RICHARD BLANCO, SANDRA M. CASTILLO, ADRIAN CASTRO, ARIEL FRANCISCO, RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ, FARID MATUK, PABLO MEDINA, DEBORAH PAREDEZ, GABRIEL RAMIREZ, and ALEXANDRA LYTTON REGALADO. Introduction by CARIDAD MORO-GRONLIER, poet laureate for Miami-Dade County; moderated by MAX RUDIN, president and publisher of Library of America.

THREE POETS LAUREATE IN CONVERSATION

Room 8303 (Building 8, 3rd Floor)

Join us for a poetry reading and conversation on the role of the localized poet laureate in service to the community. DIANNELY ANTIGUA (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) grapples with the body as a site of pain and trauma in Good Monster, chronicling her reckoning with shame, her fallout with faith, and the desire to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body. Love Prodigal by TRACI BRIMHALL (Kansas) lives in the dishevelment of starting over from a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family, and chronic illness, reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. CARIDAD MORO-GRONLIER (Miami-Dade County) plunges readers into Cuban American life on-the-hyphen in Tortillera, considering the role of language on gender, sexuality, diaspora, and shame. Moderated by NICOLE TALLMAN, poetry ambassador for Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

“CARIBBEAN NARRATIVES: HISTORY, HEROES & HEALING” – PANEL

Room 8302 (Building 8, 3rd Floor)

DIANNELY ANTIGUA’s Good Monster presents a raw and innovative poetry collection that navigates themes of trauma, chronic pain, and mental illness. MERLE COLLINS’ Ocean Stirrings: A Work of Fiction in Tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Working Mother and Activist, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings offers a poetic exploration of Little’s life, intertwining historical narrative with the power of imagination to illuminate a figure often overshadowed by her famous son. GEOFFREY PHILP’s graphic novel My Name is Marcus introduces readers to Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican icon who ignited a global movement for social justice. Together, these works offer profound insights into the history, heroes, and healing that define the Caribbean experience. Moderated by poet, blogger, and radio host SHARON CORINTHIAN.

Poetry Reading Featuring Diannely Antigua -  November 12, Durham, NH

Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence, Diannely Antigua will read her poem, "Golden Shovel with Solstice" which is included in the Latino Poetry anthology and share some of her other work with us as well. We will also read poems from the anthology focusing on the themes of Voice and Resistance, Family and Community, and Language. Our readers will include Daniel Chávez Landeros and Lucía Montás (both from UNH) and Mary Russell (Center for the Book). This event, which is free and open to the public, will be held on Tuesday November 12, 2024, 5-7pm at Durham Public Library.

Latino Poetry: Places We Call Home is a major public humanities initiative, planned for 2024–25, that celebrates and explores the multifaceted legacy of Latino poetry. It is directed by Library of America and funded with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Lugares que llamamos hogar es una gran iniciativa pública en el campo de las humanidades, que se proyecta para el 2024 – 2025. Es dirigida por Library of América con el generoso apoyo del Fondo Nacional para las Humanidades.

Whiting Award–winning poet Diannely Antigua (Good Monster) and National Book Award finalist Danez Smith (Bluff) are joined by Oregon Public Broadcasting host and producer Jenn Chávez to reflect on the role despair and violence, hope and resilience play in their latest poetry collections.

About Good Monster:

With an equal dose of fatalism and dark wit, Antigua captures the body’s capacity to cage and cradle sadness.

Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster grapples with the body as a site of chronic pain and trauma. Poignant and guttural, the collection “voyage[s] the land between crisis and hope,” chronicling Antigua’s reckoning with shame and her fallout with faith. As poems cage and cradle devastating truths–a stepfather’s abusive touch, a mother’s “soft harm”–the speaker’s anxiety, depression, and boundless need become monstrous shadows. Here, poems dance on bars, speak in tongues, and cry in psych wards. When “God [becomes] a house [she] can’t leave,” language becomes the only currency left. We see the messiness of survival unfold through sestinas, a series of Sad Girl sonnets, and diary entries–an invented collage form using Antigua’s personal journals. At the crux of despair, Antigua locates a resilient desire to find a love that will remain, to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body and, above all, to keep on living.

About Bluff:

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America’s acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem–part map, part annotation, part visual argument–offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love–those given and made–are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Join poets Amanda Hawkins and Diannely Antigua at UpUp Books where they’ll read from their collections and discuss how poetry “cage[s] and cradle[s]” visceral truths. Hawkins’s forthcoming collection, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones(Wandering Aengus, 2025), “burns through themes of living, dying, of the spiritual, how human beings fit onto and into the earth.” Antigua’s Good Monster (Copper Canyon, 2024) “reckons with shame and her fallout with faith.” Both poets embrace darkness and ambiguity in their pursuit of spaces – bodily and otherwise – worthy of being called home.

Living Writers Poetry Series Presents: Diannely Antigua

Thursday, October 24, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
Diannely Antigua Reading From Her Poetry

Click here to stream.

Living Writers Poetry Series Presents: Diannely Antigua

Wednesday, October 23, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
So You Want to Make a Podcast? With Diannely Antigua.

Click here to stream.

Wednesday, October 9

6:00 PM A SHOWCASE OF BLACK POET LAUREATES

PORTLAND - SPACE Gallery

Five Black poets from all over the U.S. who have held or currently hold the title of Poet Laureate in their city will read their original work and engage in a panel discussion moderated by former poet laureate of Portland, Maine Maya Williams. Featuring A$iahMae (Charleston, South Carolina), Andrea Vocab Sanderson (San Antonio, Texas), Diannely Antigua (Portsmouth, New Hampshire), Junious "Jay" Ward (Charlotte, North Carolina), and Melissa Ferrer-Civil (Kansas City, Missouri).

More Info HERE!

1-2:30pm [Hybrid] — Poets of the Public: New England Poet Laureates
Poets will share about their role as Poet Laureate in their respective communities, sharing information about the programming we each developed, and will discuss what it means to be a “Civic Poet” with a broad set of responsibilities and audiences while also maintaining one’s own personal writing practice. Featuring Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua.

Register HERE!

Join us for a celebration of Food, Art, Culture, and Community.

WHEN:
Sunday, August 18th, 2024

WHERE:
Strawbery Banke Museum
Portsmouth, NH

Join us on Tuesday, July 23 when we welcome poets Eugenia Leigh & Diannely Antigua to The Notebooks Collective for an evening of conversation about creativity and connection. We are thrilled to host this In Conversation, in which the poets will discuss their newest books, Bianca and Good Monster respectively, among other things.

This is a virtual event. RSVP here to receive the zoom link to join.

Join us for an evening with Diannely Antigua and Ani Gjika.

Free and open to all. Donations are appreciated to support the GWC’s work in the community.

Register HERE!

Join the Cambridge Public Library in celebrating Caribbean American Heritage Month with a poetry reading and conversation featuring two award-winning local poets with roots in the Caribbean, DIANNELY ANTIGUA and PATRICK SYLVAIN.

Each poet will read poems for about twenty minutes, to be followed by a wide-ranging conversation and audience Q&A.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two books of poetry, including Good Monster, published just last month by Copper Canyon Press. She is the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH.

Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American poet, writer, social and literary critic, and photographer who has published widely on Haiti and Haitian diaspora culture, politics, language, and religion. He is the author of several poetry books in English and Haitian, and his poems have been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Simmons 

This reading and talk will be hybrid (via Zoom). It is co-sponsored by the Cambridge Public Library Foundation.

Date: Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Time: 6:00pm - 7:30pm

Location: Lecture Hall, Main Library

Registration is required. There are 150 in-person seats available. There are 150 online seats available.

In person at Brookline Booksmith! Join us for an evening of poetry with Amy M. Alvarez, Octavio González, Anthony DiPietro, & Diannely Antigua.

This event is part of Third Thursdays Poetry, a monthly reading series at Brookline Booksmith.

Register for the event!

RSVP to let us know you're coming! Depending on the volume of responses, an RSVP may be required for entrance to the event. You will also be alerted to important details about the program, including safety requirements, cancellations, and book signing updates.

Livestream!

Barring technical difficulty, this event will be livestreamed on our store YouTube channel.

Join us for a virtual reading with Diannely Antigua, AE Hines, & Collin Kelley!

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83904422258

Register HERE!

With poet Diannely Antigua!

Poets love the moon, and the moon is queer. Yes, I said it. I'm interested in the word "queer" in relation to identity, but also as a verb, as in "to queer", to challenge expectations. Looking at poems written by beloved queer poets such as Chen Chen, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, and Donika Kelly, we will examine the moon in poetry, celebrate it, change it, and arrive at our own conclusions. This workshop is intended to be generative and exploratory. All levels of poetry experience are welcome!

About the Instructor: Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project.

* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**

Come snag your copy of Good Monster by Diannely Antigua. Stay for readings by local poets and the spinning tunes of DJ Skooch.

Register HERE!

Buy Tickets HERE!

An evening of art, performance, and community, featuring Safe Haven Ballet, along with other featured guests & readings from Diannely Antigua, Portsmouth Poet Laureate.

Please follow the link here for more information and registration!

Room 2504AB, Kansas City Convention Center, Level 2
Thursday, February 8, 2024
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm

 Combating stigmas and shame culture surrounding mental health, writers share poetry, nonfiction, and cross-genre work that embraces autism spectrum disorder, Anxiety, ADHD, OCD, Bipolar, and depression. These writers refuse to hide from or mask within an ableist society and through content and form, call attention to the creative powers of neurodiversity. They will share their work and discuss how their craft choices transform neurotypical language into a neurodiverse universe.

Participants

Moderator: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, PhD, writes poetry and nonfiction. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother (Wick Poetry Prize, KSU Press, 2019), Don't Touch the Bones(Lost Horse Press, 2020), and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023). She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Denison University.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of six books of poetry and the poet laureate of Worcester, Massachusetts. His most recent book The Diaspora Sonnets was published in 2023 with Liveright Press. He is a founding member of Kundiman and teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in theLow Res MFA Program at PLU.

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American author of two books of poetry. Poems from her new collection, Bianca, were awarded Poetry's Bess Hokin Prize and have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, Eugenia serves as a poetry editor at Adroit Journal.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second collection Good Monster is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. She received her MFA from NYU.

Allison Blevins, a queer disabled writer, is the author of Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled, Slowly/Suddenly, and five chapbooks. Her next collection is forthcoming from Persea Books. She is the director of Small Harbor Publishing and the executive editor at the museum of americana.

Diannely Antigua and The Bread & Poetry Project present this free poetry workshop:

Virtual Poetry Workshop, I Am Here: Affirmation as a Form of Resistance (register here!)

Workshop Description:

“Not being who I am is unacceptable.” - Nikky Finney

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” - Audre Lorde

A catalyst to choosing oneself through difficult times and practicing the importance of our truth, “I Am Here: Affirmation as a form of Resistance” is a workshop where participants can speak back to what has made us feel small, invisible, and impossible throughout our lives. This workshop encourages participants to reclaim their bodies and histories. Whether it is a bully from childhood, someone who told you that you can’t, or a country with systems that have shown they don't care whether you are alive, it’s time to denounce the false truths others have given us about who we are and our worth.

Facilitator bio:

Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx writer, performer and educator. A 2023 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry at Adroit Journal. Gabriel has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo, Miami Book Fair, a graduate fellow at The Watering Hole, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. You can find his work in various spaces, including Youtube, and in publications like POETRY Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal, The Volta, Split This Rock, BOMB, Acentos Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly and others as well as 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). For more information visit www.RamirezPoet.com.

*We are pleased to offer this event free of charge, but ask if you might consider making a donation of any amount if it is within your means, as it helps us continue to offer free poetry resources. This event has been made possible by The Bread & Poetry Project.

RSVP HERE!

When: Saturday, November, 2nd 6:00 PM

Where: 801 Islington Street, Suite 12, Portsmouth, NH 03801

As this event is taking place on Día de los Muertos, we invite guests to contribute to our Ofrenda (altar space). Please bring photos of ancestors and offerings of flowers, etc to add to the Ofrenda for the evening.

Join Diannely Antigua, who is both the youngest and the first person of color to be named Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, and Ben Bacote, founder and director of NH PANTHER, writer, activist, and humanities teacher, for their latest offering in a series of lovely evenings of poetry and conversation. Antigua and Bacote will share selections by LatinX writers touching on the themes of love and resistance, and discuss the intersections of history, poetry, and activism through the lens of their personal experiences. Additionally, Antigua will record the event, to be featured on her podcast, Bread & Poetry. Appetizers and complimentary beverages provided by Vida Cantina.

RSVP HERE!

Join us on October 24, 2023 at 8PM to celebrate Adroit's 47th issue with a reading featuring some of this issue's contributors!

The editors of The Adroit Journal are thrilled to welcome you to a reading celebrating the release of our forty-seventh issue, hosted by Divya Mehrish!

Join via Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81757218321

Readers will include:

• Ahmad Almallah

• Diannely Antigua

• Kinsale Drake

• Cora Enterline

• Kelly X. Hui

• Amanda Machado

• Cintia Santana

Ahmad Almallah was born in Bethlehem, Palestine, and moved to the states when he was 18. His first book of poems in English is BITTER ENGLISH (Chicago 2019). His second is BORDER WISDOM (Winter Editions 2023). Other poems and prose of his in Arabic and in English are out there. He is Artist in Residence at UPenn.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second collection, Good Monster, is forthcoming with Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She received her MFA at NYU and was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. She teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and is currently the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH.

Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a poet, playwright, and performer based out of the Southwest. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poets.org, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, Nylon, MTV, Teen Vogue, Time, and elsewhere. She recently graduated from Yale University, where she received the J. Edgar Meeker Prize, the Academy of American Poets College Prize, the Young Native Playwrights Award, and the 2022 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. She was named by Time Magazine as an artist representing her decade “changing how we see the world,” and is the founder of NDN Girls Book Club (www.ndngirlsbookclub.org).

Cora Enterline is a graduate student of Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin and nonfiction editor at The Spotlong Review. Her writing has appeared in Psaltery & Lyre and Hominum Journal. In her free time she hosts a wine club and literary salon.

Kelly X. Hui is a student journalist, abolitionist community organizer, and ghost writer (person who writes about ghosts). She is a Mellon Mays fellow studying English, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. In her free time, she works as a barista in the basement coffee shop of the divinity school.

Amanda E. Machado is a writer whose work has been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Washington Post, Slate, The Guardian, and more. In addition to their essay writing, Amanda also is a public speaker and workshop facilitator on issues of justice and anti-oppression for organizations around the world. She currently lives on unceded Ohlone land in Oakland.

Cintia Santana's work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Guernica, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Narrative, Pleaides, Poetry Northwest, Poem-a-Day, The Threepenny Review, and West Branch. She is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and her poems have been selected for Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, as well as the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology. She teaches fiction and poetry workshops in Spanish, as well as literary translation courses at Stanford University. Her first poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet, was published by Four Way Books in September 2023.