Virtual Poetry Event: Omowole Jesse N. Alexander, Shakeema Smalls

Sunday May 22, 2022 – 2pm

Registration Required – use this link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0tf-2trT4vGN0OaXwq5nWShZLwqTdgLBnJ

Omowole Jesse N. Alexander is a son of Jesse, patriarch of the Alexander clan, leader, organizer, Raceman, and Maude Anna, Griot, visionary artist, poet, muse, teacher, Ancestor. He lives on Piscataway land in Maryland. “We are a stolen but thriving people, living on stolen land.” His poetry has won second place in the First Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Zero Hunger in the First World Food Day 2018 Contest, and placed as a finalist in the 1999 Paterson Literary Review’s Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest. He has been featured at Grace Cavalieri’s The Poet and the Poem 2020-21 Series, Words out Loud Virtual Reading, Evil Grin, the Davies Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church’s Annual Poetry Service, The Knitting Factory, Groove Drops, and the Sumei Multidisciplinary Center. His work has appeared in Remembering Amiri Baraka, Free Black Space: Content and Code for those Living in the Black, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Sojourners Magazine, The Drumming Between Us: Black Love & Erotic Poetry, and Drumvoices Revue: A Confluence of Literary, Cultural & Vision Arts.

Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III) is a poet and non-fiction writer, author of One Shoe Marching Towards Heaven, published in Crab Orchard Review, African-American Review, Ploughshares, Beltway Quarterly, and other journals.  He teaches at Bowie State University.

Shakeema Smalls is from Georgetown, South Carolina. Her work has been published in a variety of outlets including Blackberry: A Magazine, Tidal Basin Review, The Fem, Radius Lit, Free Black Space, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, and Rigorous, among others.