Join us Thursday, 8/25 at 7pm, as we celebrate poet Raegen Pietrucha's first full-length collection Head of a Gorgon and Matthew E. Henry's The Colored Page. They will be joined in conversation by artist Jackie Liu.

Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of the Colored page (Sundress Publications), and the chapbooks Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag) and Dust & Ashes (Californios Press). The editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal, MEH’s recent poetry and prose is appearing or forthcoming in Barren Magazine, The Florida Review, Massachusetts Review, New York Quarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Shenandoah and Zone 3. MEH’s an educator who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. You can find him at www.MEHPoeting.com writing about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground.

Jackie Liu is a 19-year-old fine artist from the Greater Boston area and a rising sophomore at Stanford University. In her paintings, she combines realism with abstraction to convey narratives on scales ranging from the personal to the societal to the metaphysical, often traversing themes of trauma, identity, and resilience. She often adds layers of dimensionality to her art by marrying her visual pieces with spoken word and video. Many of her pieces incorporate activism, embodying principles of racial and environmental justice, gender equality, mental health, and more. Her art has been featured by Instagram, Buzzfeed, Glossier, and XXL. With over 1 million followers across her social media platforms, her work can be found @jackieliuart on Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube and at jackieliuart.com.

Raegen Pietrucha writes, edits, and consults creatively and professionally, and Head of a Gorgon is her debut poetry collection. Her poetry chapbook, An Animal I Can't Name, won the 2015 Two of Cups Press competition, and she has a memoir in progress. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she was an assistant editor for Mid-American Review. Her work has been published in Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. Connect with her at raegenmp.wordpress.com and on Twitter @freeradicalrp.

Art Seeking Change: A Discussion and Reading