Live Poetry Event: Tonita Austin, Sibelan Forrester, Alison Lubar

Wednesday May 18, 2022 – 7pm

Live at Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom Street and on zoom – Registration Required – Registration Link https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcudOCrpjovE9JWt5KotUx73STwYpTOT0og

Tonita Austin also known as “Toni Love” is a gifted poet, singer, activist, and writer born in West Philadelphia. While attending Columbia University, Tonita was a student of Amiri Baraka and performed in Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” as the Lady in Orange. Her writing is influenced by both experiences. She is a contributor to the anthology The Black Body and featured poet in the 2018 and 2020 Winter/Fall edition of the Philadelphia Arts and Urban Literary magazine. The Restoration EP is her first published recording; Toni’s Room is her first published book. Toni currently resides in Media, PA with her two children James and Janai.

Sibelan Forrester is a poet and translator who grew up in Colorado but now lives in the Philadelphia suburbs. She has published translations of fiction, poetry and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, and of poetry from Ukrainian, and her book of poetry SECOND HAND FATE was published in 2016 by Parnilis Media. She is the host of the Mad Poets Society’s First Wednesday reading series. In her day job she teaches at Swarthmore College.

Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary femme of color whose life work (aside from wordsmithing) has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people. Their debut chapbook, Philosophers Know Nothing About Love, is forthcoming with Thirty

West Publishing in May 2022. Most recently, their work has been published by or is forthcoming with Moonstone Press, New York Quarterly, and Sinister Wisdom.