Varieties of religious experience and experiences of religious doctrine, institutions and traditions give poets, especially women and the gender non-conforming, much to write about. Representing a diversity of poets, styles, and approaches, these readings will explore saints and sinners, myth and ritual, doctrine and heresy, cosmology and tradition.
Featured poets include: Fullamusu Bangura, Traci Brimhall, Lisa Cronenberg, Lisa Dordal, Mojdeh Stoakley, and Ruth Williams.
Woman Made Gallery hosts literary events that coincide with each of our juried group exhibitions. The current poetry series is curated by Nina Corwin. Kurt Eric Heintz is WMG’s Audio Recordist, and Jennifer Steele is WMG’s Literary Events Outreach Coordinator. Thank you to WMG’s Literary Team and all Poets.
Fullamusu Bangura is a queer Black writer and poet, originally from Washington, D.C. and currently residing in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has been featured in TRACK//FOUR Journal, Peach Magazine and Memoir Mixtapes. Catch her on Instagram singing to her cat Taraji or thirst-tweeting Marc Lamont Hill at @killamusu.
Traci Brimhall is the author of three poetry collections: Saudade (Copper Canyon); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award; as well as the forthcoming poetry-essay hybrid collection Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon). Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, the Best American series, and elsewhere. She’s an associate professor of creative writing at Kansas State University and lives in Manhattan, KS.
Lisa Croneberg is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and has published poems in various journals, including Ploughshares and The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of a Bread Loaf scholarship and of fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and has most recently served as an Associate Editor for RHINO Poetry.
Lisa Dordal is the author of Mosaic of the Dark from Black Lawrence Press and teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize and the Robert Watson Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, CALYX, The Feminist Wire, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her website is lisadordal.com.
Mojdeh Stoakley is an internationally touring and award-winning writer, performer, multi-media artist, and arts + public health educator. She’s the Director of the 29th National Poetry Slam and the new Education Director for Chicago Poetry Center. Mojdeh’s shared the stage with Oscar and Grammy winners, and led slam teams to finals stages! When she’s not being a creative savant and organizer, she’s engaged in trauma-informed social justice initiatives and HIV prevention research at the UIC’s School of Public Health.
Ruth Williams is the author of a poetry collection, Flatlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) and a chapbook, Conveyance (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her poetry has also appeared in literary journals such as 32 Poems, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat, Pleiades, Cimarron Review, Third Coast and Faultline, among others. Currently, Williams is an Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College and an Editor for Bear Review, a literary journal based in Kansas City, MO.
Nina Corwin — WMG Literary Events Curator.
Nina Corwin is a published poet, Founding Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and psychotherapist/advocate for victims of sexual assault. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Uncertainty of Maps and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Her work has appeared in ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Verse and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Corwin is an Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and co-edited Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art By Women. She has read and performed her work across the country, at times set with musical or choreographic compositions.
Jennifer Steele – WMG Literary Events Outreach Coordinator.
Jennifer Steele is a published poet and educator and serves as the Partnerships Coordinator for Teen Services at Chicago Public Library. She served as the co-founder and co-curator of the Revolving Door Reading Series. Her work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Callaloo Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Warpland Journal, So To Speak, and others, and is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow. She has taught creative writing and digital media arts across Chicago since 2008 and has collaborated with numerous youth organizations and cultural institutions, designing innovative arts programming.
Kurt Heintz – WMG Literary Events Audio Recordist.
Kurt Heinz once taught computer graphics programming at Columbia College, and worked as an independent web developer. He’s since become the lead video director at Britannica. Heintz is known for his poetry videos, begun in the early 1990s. He also videoconferenced his colleagues’ poetry in the late 1990s — years before Skype and the iPhone. He was a technical advisor to the Electronic Literature Organization in its earliest years, and is the video content editor for Another Chicago Magazine.
Thank you Angela Narciso Torres, for your wonderful work and support for WMG and our Literary Program!
For an archive of past readings visit: http://voices.e-poets.net/WMG recorded by Kurt Heintz.
Follow WMG Literary Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WMGpoetry
All events are free and open to the public. Donations are always welcome and appreciated: http://womanmade.org/donate
Woman Made Gallery is supported in part by grants from The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events; The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; The Illinois Arts Council Agency; a major anonymous donor; and the generosity of its members and contributors.