Porsha Monique Allen received her MFA in poetry from Queens University of Charlotte in 2021. Her work has appeared & is forthcoming in Scalawag Magazine, Blood Orange Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, & elsewhere. Porsha lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Attorious Renee Augustin is a black neurodivergent nonbinary artist from Wanamassa, NJ. They trust their work is to be a catalyst of growth for all people from oppressive systems. Their work appears currently in Lampblack Lit Magazine, Cixous 72 Journal, Forward Reviews and on YouTube. Attorious recently received their Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry at Rutgers University- Newark. 

Lark Omura is a writer of mixed Japanese and European ancestry, born and raised in occupied Hawai'i, on the island of Maui. Her poetry has appeared in The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, The Offing, The Hawai'i Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from Rutgers University-Newark, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of two poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy, winner of the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Ghost, Like a Place, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Individual poems have appeared in African American Review, The New York Times Magazine, as well as in a number of anthologies. Pollock directs the MFA Program at Manhattanville College and lives in the Hudson Valley.

Vincent Toro is a Boricua poet, playwright, and professor. He is the author of two poetry collections: Tertulia (Penguin Random House, 2020) and Stereo.Island.Mosaic. (Ahsahta, 2016), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Vincent is a recipient of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, the Spanish Repertory Theater’s Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award, a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a New Jersey State Council for the Arts Writer’s Fellowship. His poetry and prose has been published in dozens of magazines and journals and has been anthologized in Saul Williams’ CHORUS, Puerto Rico En Mi Corazon, Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Misrepresented People, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Rider University, is a Dodge Foundation Poet, and is a contributing editor for Kweli Literary Journal.

Digital Launch Reading II: Poetry