2017 Philly Loves Poetry Interview and Readings Series on PhillyCAM

There are there are over 50 organizations that promote poetry in the Philadelphia area. They represent every poetry form, ethnic background, age, gender and community. This series consists of a panel of guest poets and artists discussing the opportunities which their group or organization provides for poets in Philly as well as the themes that influence them. The program is broadcast live on the first Tuesday of each month. The program is free and open to everyone. Please join us.

Tuesday November 7, 2017 -6:30pm

On January 15, 2017, Alicia Askenase joined writers Stephanie Feldman and Nathaniel Popkin in curating Philadelphia’s iteration of the Pen America Writers Resist international day of readings of resistance.  Writers Resist Philadelphia was a standing room only event held at the National Museum of American Jewish History. The group continues with meetings of Philadelphia area writers in their efforts to affect change and resistance through writing.  WRPHL also has a Facebook page as a forum for writers, and will hold another reading in the near future.  On November 7, Ms. Askenase, along with fellow poets of resistance, Ahmad Almallah, Herman Beavers, and Alina MacNeal, will continue on this path, discussing what writing and resistance mean to them and their writing practices, and read from their own work.

Alicia Askenase is an educator who has taught English and creative writing, co-organizer of Philadelphia Writers Resist, founding co-editor of the poetry journal 6ix, and Director of Literary Programs at the Walt Whitman Center in New Jersey for many years. She is the author of the chapbooks Cover, Suspect, The Luxury of Pathos, and Shirley Shirley.  Her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies including Feminist Studies, Review Revista Inter- Americana, 5trope, sonaweb, texture, Chain, Black Mountain Review II, aerial, The World, 100 Days, and New Works by Philadelphia Poets. 

Ahmad Almallah is a poet, scholar and translator of Arabic literature with a PhD in Arabic literature and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He grew up in Bethlehem, Palestine and moved to the U.S. when he was 18. His set of poems “Recourse,” won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship from Hunter College. His poems have appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads will lead You Home, and forthcoming in Apiary, Supplement and Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees.

Herman Beavers is Professor of English and Africana Studies at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. His most recent poems have either appeared in The Langston Hughes Colloquy, MELUS, and Versadelphia, Cleaver Magazine, The American Arts Quarterly, and Supplement.  Herman is author of Obsidian Blues and Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison. He serves as an advisory editor for The African American Review, The Black Scholar, The Journal of Black Studies, and Modern Fiction Studies.

Alina Macneal is a Philadelphia-based educator/writer/poet/translator/and co-host of the Fourth Wednesday Moonstone poetry series at Fergie’s. Her poems have appeared in Apiary, Poems for the Writing, and The World to Come, and in 2015 she was a finalists for the Raynes poetry prize. This August two of her political poems were published in Poetry24. She has been a faculty member at Drexel University for 19 years.

Host: Charles S. Carr