Houston’s Public Poetry will feature Aliah Lavonne Tigh as a feature reader in August.

Join the series Saturday, August 3rd, at 2pm-4pm.

This Public Poetry reading is virtual and especially accessible (after registering) for those concerned about Covid. Please note that Public Poetry uses Microsoft Teams and the Teams app, not Zoom, to conduct virtual readings.

Link to register

Join us Friday at The Residency at 821 (Haywood Drive) for an open house evening of art and creativity.  Chuck Gutierrez and LimaqWNC will be providing Peruvian vegan light bites. Water is our theme for the night, and we'll have a short film screening, a community poetry writing workshop, and a sneak peek at an immersive art installation centered around water.

This evening will begin with Dogwood Fellow Tiffany Womack’s 20 minute film, What About the Water, which explores the role of riparian forests in purifying and protecting our water supply and the community protectors of this water. We'll then do a writing exercise guiding community members to write their own poetry reflecting on water. The studio will feature a digital installation by Liz Williams, Mik Mitchell, and Shani Kashani. We will also have poem excerpts and art by 821 Artist in Residence, Aliah Lavonne Tigh, on the walls. 

Tram Editions’ author Aliah Lavonne Tigh will be signing copies of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers

Event: The Houston BIPOC Books Festival
Location: Second Floor of The Asia Society, signing at the Tram Editions and RAWI table.
Time: Saturday May 4th, 2:30pm-3:30pm

Aliah Lavonne Tigh will be featured in the TRAM Editions Press reading at the New Orleans Poetry Festival as part of the event, “Margins That Matter: A Celebration of TRAM Editions Poets.”

NOLA Poetry festival takes place April 20-April 21st, and this TRAM Editions reading is at 1pm, Saturday, in suite 300A, at the New Orleans Healing Center.

This 7pmCST/8pmEST workshop is open to queer Southern Artists and is hosted by Liz Williams and The Campaign for Southern Equality Artists Studio!

The workshop will feature guided writing exercises, against a backdrop of mindfulness and turning inwards, during this time of deep pain and unrest. After a short time of introductions and check-ins, Aliah will guide attendees through a series of writing exercises. We will go through writing exercises with themes of grief, love, resistance.

Because we are gathering during the season of Nowruz, we will draw inspiration from Chaharshanbeh Suri and Nowruz, and we will end the workshop with a short guided ritual or prayer asking for change, a new spring, new life.

We understand that we are gathering while living in a country that allows, here, the deaths of our marginalized siblings and supports the ongoing genocides of our siblings abroad. The intention for this gathering is two-fold. First, we hope for a place where we can feel our grief and deep love, and as we each reunite with our feeling-bodies, we hope to not only create and discover ourselves through writing, but also support and mirror each other’s experience and strengthen our resolve for change.

Join Aliah Lavonne Tigh at the AWP Bookfair where they will be signing copies of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers and the latest issue of Mizna.

WHEN: Friday February 9th at 11:00 am -12:30 pm
WHERE: The RAWI and Mizna Booth, #1431 in the Kansas City Convention Center

Please join us on Thursday for a panel discussing community building.

Featuring: Aliah Lavonne Tigh(moderator), Randall James Tyrone, Chankrisna Tea, Glenn Shaheen, and Stalina Villarreal.

Location: Room 2101, Kansas City Convention Center, Street Level

Panel Description: Artist collectives have long been places of professional knowledge sharing, resistance, and deep care, but in this era of COVID-19, inaccessibility, and increasing homophobia, collectives offer invaluable support for the writer. Whether virtual or in person, local community-originating or a national group unified by an ethnic, cultural, or Queer identity, collectives offer writers the ability to build a new society or way of relating. These five writers of color gather to share their experience.

This panel of community-based writers and artists of color expands and troubles the practice of writing by composing across genres to explore issues of race, identity and aesthetics. Through an experimental exploration of sound, text, and visual art including breath chorus and multimodal queries, the panelists will share and discuss work which mines the richness of archive and memory to craft maps of identity and possibility.

Click here to register for the Association of Writers and Programs Conference

Date and Seattle Convention Center location: Rooms 335-336, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3

Panelists: Ching-In Chen, Emgee Dufresne, Tonya M. Foster, Aliah Lavonne Tigh, and Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal

About the Panelists:

Ching-In Chen(Moderator) is author of The Heart's Traffic, recombinant, to make black paper sing, Kundiman for Kin and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities. A Kundiman and Lambda Fellow, they teach at the University of Washington Bothell.

Emgee Dufresne is an author, multimedia artist, and bodyworker. She works as an editor for Kelsey Street Press and she is a Kundiman Fellow. Emgee is the author of not so, sea and Anemal Uter Meck. Her current work explores vessels, bodies, and flight.

Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court and the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os. Co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art, she holds the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.

Aliah Lavonne Tigh is the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a 2022 Chapbook with Tram Editions, with poems appearing in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Guernica, The Rupture, and others. Tigh writes and works in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal is a poet, translator, and essayist whose book Watcha is forthcoming from Deep Vellum Publishing. She has published translations of poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Minerva Reynosa, Maricela Guerrero, and Sergio Pérez Torres.

Chapbooks are often seen as a stepping stone to a first book, but previously this has been a form for historically marginalized communities, non-traditional poetics, and other kinds of cultural outliers. From the Black Arts Movement to the ‘90s slam scene, the chapbook lives as a form in its own right. These five writers of color discuss the chapbook's freedom to create physical artifacts that are not beholden to the dominant publishing industry's math, genre borders, or censorship.

Panelists: Aliah Lavonne Tigh (Moderator), Nandi Comer, Summer Farah, Stalina Villarreal, and Priscilla Wathington.

Seattle Convention Center location: Rooms 335-336, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 3

Click here to register for the Association of Writers and Programs Conference

About the Panelists:

Nandi Comer is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow.

Summer Farah is a poet, editor, and critic who currently acts as the outreach coordinator for the Radius of Arab American Writers. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, LitHub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Game Over Books in late 2023.

Aliah Lavonne Tigh(Moderator) is the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a 2022 Chapbook with Tram Editions, with poems appearing in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Guernica, The Rupture, and others. Tigh writes and works in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal is a poet, translator, and essayist whose book Watcha is forthcoming from Deep Vellum Publishing. She has published translations of poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Minerva Reynosa, Maricela Guerrero, and Sergio Pérez Torres.

Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American writer & editor. Her chapbook, PAPER AND STICK (Tram Editions / 2021), draws from her humanitarian & human rights work. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salamander & elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson.

Join Tram Editions for the virtual launch of their third chapbook, CONTAIN, by Cynthia Hogue! Hogue will read selections from her new chapbook, and special guests Priscilla Wathington, Aliah Lavonne Tigh, and Mary Gilliland will read their poems too! The event is 5:00 pm ET /4:00 pm CT.

About Our Readers:

Cynthia Hogue’s most recent collections are Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets, and In June the Labyrinth (2017). Her tenth collection, instead, it is dark, will be out from Red Hen Press in June of 2023. Her third book-length translation (with Sylvain Gallais) is Nicole Brossard’s Distantly (Omnidawn 2022). Her Covid chapbook is entitled Contain (Tram Editions 2022). Among her honors are a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland, two NEA Fellowships, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (2013). She served as Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day for September (2022), sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Hogue was the inaugural Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Tucson.

Mary Gilliland is the author of two award-winning poetry collections: The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020) and forthcoming The Devil’s Fools (2022). Her poems are widely published in print and online literary journals and most recently anthologized in Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose, and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms In Our Hands. After college she apprenticed to Gary Snyder in the Sierra foothills where she studied Buddhism and helped to build a wood-framed public school. Mary retired early from teaching at Cornell in order to devote herself to poetry.

Aliah Lavonne Tigh is the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a 2022 chapbook with Tram Editions, with poems appearing in Guernica, The Texas Review, Matter: A Journal of Political Poetry and Commentary, The Rupture, and others. Tigh has joined other writers for the Tin House Summer Workshop, recently read for The Brooklyn Rail and Houston’s Poison Pen Reading Series and contributed work for a Gulf Coast Journal and Texas Contemporary ekphrastic collaboration and was a grateful Recipient of Idyllwild Arts’ 2017 Bentley-Buckman Writing Fellowship. She holds poetry and philosophy degrees from the University of Houston and an MFA from Antioch Los Angeles. Tigh lives in Houston, Texas.

Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American writer and editor. Her debut poetry chapbook, PAPER AND STICK (Tram Editions / 2021), scrutinizes Israel’s militarized attempts to constrict Palestinian bodies and breath. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salamander, and The Normal School, among others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and sits on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI).

Jeri Frederickson hosts this book club gathering with a small group of writers reading Weren’t We Natural Swimmers.

While the event is a closed one, here is a link to Frederickson’s latest poetry collection You are Not Lost .

Zoom reading with Houston writers each reading for five minutes! This event features Angélique Jamail as Emcee, with a line up of exceptional poets including: Carol Munn, Stella Brice, Charlie Scott, Adam Holt, Dru Watkins, Joshua Burton, Aliah Lavonne Tigh(meeee!), Christopher Miguel Flakus, and Autumn Hayes.

Link to join event group that has access to zoom link

Writing Our Whole Selves: Mixed Writers Challenge the Narrow Literary Landscape. Presenters : Donna Miscolta, Jeni McFarland, Talia Kolluri, Aliah Lavonne Tigh, Dawn Barron

In a society that favors the unambiguous over the complex, how do mixed authors of color write the truth of ourselves? Do we depict the ambiguity of our backgrounds or default to the recognizable and marketable? Do we reframe the issue by writing nonhuman characters? How do we embrace our in-betweenness and how do we influence structural change to reflect the nuances of the mixed experience? Five writers discuss how their work fits in the literary landscape now and in a more inclusive future.

111AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level. Location: S134.

Click here to register for the AWP conference, whether you’d like to attend virtually or in person.

Warm-up reader for Novelist Jeni McFarland, author of The House of Deep Water, who was named one of USA Today‘s 100 Black Novelists and Fiction Writers You Should Read. The event is free but limited to 50 participants. Please click here to go Bespoke Books and Archives’ events and register

Novelists, if you’re interested in studying nontraditional plot building or structures, you should look at McFarland’s novel.