Maryam Ivette Parhizkar curates Brooklyn Rail’s 88th Radical Poetry Reading. Parhizkar will read work alongside fellow Texan artists Irene Vazquez, Lupe Mendez, JD Pluecker, and Aliah Lavonne Tigh.
This virtual reading is 1pm Eastern/12 pm Central. Please click here to register for this event.
About the organization and magazine: “The Brooklyn Rail provides an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and far beyond. It was founded in October 2000 and currently published 10 times annually.”
About the Readers:
Aliah Lavonne Tigh is the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a 2022 chapbook with Tram Editions out now, and her poems have appeared in Guernica, The Texas Review, Matter Monthly, The Rupture, and others. She holds poetry and philosophy degrees from the University of Houston and an MFA from Antioch Los Angeles. Tigh lives in Houston, Texas, and you can find her on Twitter at @ALoveTigh.
Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet, journalist, and editor. Irene graduated from Yale with a BA in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and English, as part of the 2021 cohort of Mellon Mays-Bouchet Fellows. Recently, Irene was named a winter/spring 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Irene’s works have appeared or are forthcoming in Muzzle, the Oxford American, and the lickety-split, among others. Irene’s debut chapbook, Take Me to the Water, is forthcoming from Bloof Books in Fall 2022. Mostly Irene likes drinking coffee, impulse-buying books, and reminding people that the South has something to say.
JD Pluecker’s undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018) and forthcoming Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny (Deep Vellum Press). They are author of Ford Over (Noemi Press, 2016), and The Unsettlements: Dad. They previously worked as part of the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire as well as the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. JD has received the Warhol Arts Writing Grant and has exhibited work at Blaffer Art Museum, the Hammer, Project Row Houses, and more.
Originally from Galveston, TX, Lupe Mendez (Writer//Educator//Activist) is the author WHY I AM LIKE TEQUILA (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the founder of Tintero Projects which works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Texas Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub. Lupe earned his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Texas @ El Paso. Mendez’s work can been seen in print and online formats including the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast Journal, the Texas Review, the L.A. Review of Books, Split This Rock, Poetry Magazine and Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets. Mendez is the 2022 Texas Poet Laureate.
Born into a Salvadoran and Iranian family in southwest Houston, Texas, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a poet, interdisciplinary scholar, and teacher. Her chapbooks include Somewhere Else the Sun is Falling into Someone’s Eyes (Belladonna Collaborative, 2019), As for the future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016) and Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014). She is a doctoral candidate at Yale University, a member of CantoMundo, and a member of the U.S. Central American collective Tierra Narrative. With Óscar Moisés Díaz, she represented Tierra Narrative as a Curatorial Fellow at the Poetry Project in Spring 2021.
