Emari DiGiorgio is the author of Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018), the winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She’s the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She’s received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.

Indian American poet Raena Shirali is the author of GILT (YesYes Books, 2017), an experimental collection grappling with standards created by an invisible system and enforced by family, relationships, and violations of women’s rights in a reckoning of intersectional identity. She has performed at such venues as: the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center in NYC, Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab, Slam Free or Die, College of Charleston, & many more. As an educator & when she isn’t teaching at the college level, Shirali gives craft talks on the political weight of poetic endings, highlighting voices of color & immigrant & contemporary voices. Most recently, she was the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. Shirali now lives in Philadelphia, where she freelances as an editor & serves as a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine.

Dave Worrell, host

An open mic will follow the featured readers. The event is free and 21+.