15 February 2024:
Launch Celebration for And Yet Held by T. De Los Reyes!
Join us online for a Zoom reading to celebrate the launch of And Yet Held by T. De Los Reyes! Reyes will be joined by readers Julia Kochinsky Dasbach, Ae Hee Lee, and Alina Stefanescu with event moderator Mandana Chaffa! 8pm [US eastern].
Zoom link: expired
T. De Los Reyes is a Filipino poet and designer. She is the author of the chapbook Woeman, published by Hawai’i Review. A finalist for the 2021 Sappho Prize by Palette Poetry, her poems have appeared in Birdcoat Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Hobart After Dark, Pleiades, and Split Lip Magazine, among others. Her work revolves around womanhood, eros, and mapping the body—exploring geography vis-à-vis the question of identity as a person of color. Past recognitions include Notable Manuscript for the 2016 Chapbook Prize by BOAAT Press and First Place in Filipino Poetry in the 2007 Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards. She was named a Fellow for Filipino Poetry in the 2006 Ateneo Institute of Literary Arts and Practices National Writers Workshop. De Los Reyes is the founder and curator of Read a Little Poetry. She is the designer of Nowruz Journal and a mentor/community teaching assistant for Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo), a highly successful, massive open online course offered by the University of Pennsylvania, for the past decade. De Los Reyes is the founder and curator of Read a Little Poetry. She is the designer of Nowruz Journal and a mentor/community teaching assistant for Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo), a highly successful, massive open online course offered by the University of Pennsylvania, for the past decade. She lives and writes in Manila, Philippines.
Mandana Chaffa is founder and editor-in-chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters and a finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’s Best Magazine/Debut; and an editor-at-large at Chicago Review of Books. She serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, where she is vice president of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and is president of the board of The Flow Chart Foundation. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnipro, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. She spent three years in Eugene, earning an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon. She earned a Ph.D in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation, Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry, which pays particular attention to the underrepresented atrocity in the former Soviet territories. She is the founder and host of Words Together, Worlds Apart, a virtual poetry reading series born out of pandemic but meant to outlast it. Julia’s newest collection, 40 WEEKS will be out in April and available for preorder through YesYes Books. She is also the author of The Many Names for Mother, selected by Ellen Bass as the winner of the 2018 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry prize and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize and is available from Lost Horse Press and perhaps your local book store. You can find her poems in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. She is Assistant Professor and Murphy Fellow in Creative Writing at Hendrix College and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with her family.
Born in South Korea and raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee is the author of ASTERISM, selected by John Murillo for the 2022 Dorset Prize and forthcoming from Tupelo Press, and the poetry chapbooks Bedtime || Riverbed (Compound Press 2017), Dear bear, (Platypus Press 2021), and Connotary (Frost Place Chapbook Competition Winner – Bull City Press 2021). Ae Hee is a Just Buffalo Literary Center Fellow, Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholar, recipient of the James Olney Award by The Southern Review, and Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship Finalist. She has also received scholarships and honors from the Academy of American Poets, AWP, Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, among others.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. She is a poet, writer, translator, and essayist whose work can be found in literary journals including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, and Crab Creek Review, and various anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2022 edited by Matthew Zapruder, What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press of Kentucky, 2023), Stronger Than Fear (Cave Moon Press, 2022), The Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press, 2021), Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Press, 2020), Writer’s Resist Anthology (Running Wild Press, 2018), For Love of Orcas Anthology (Wandering Aengus Press, 2019), and annual anthologies from Orison Press and Bending Genres. She has served as a judge for literary prizes, including the Poetry Foundation’s 2021 Pegasus Award for Literary Criticism, the NSFP’s 2023 National Student Chapbook Prize, River Heron Review Poetry Prize, FRiction Literary Prize for Flash Fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum & Foundation Writing Prize, and others. Her debut fiction collection Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Prize and was published in May 2018. Her short prose chapbook, RIBALD, was published by Bull City Press in October 2020. Her poetry collection, DOR, won the 2020 Wandering Aengus Book Prize was published in September, 2021. Alina’s first poetry chapbook, Objects in Vases (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016) won the 2016 Award for Poetry Book of the Year from ASPS. Her hybrid collection, Stories to Read Aloud To Your Fetus (Finishing Line Press, 2018) explores how we write, imagine, and inhabit wombed bodies. She won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize, and her current poetry manuscript was selected as one of 3 finalists by Major Jackson for the 2021 Alice Day Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. When she is not writing, teaching workshops, or working for money, Alina serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, critic for various journals, President Emerita of Alabama State Poetry Society, Board Member for the Alabama Writer’s Cooperative, Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter, Co-Founder of 100,000 Poets for Change Birmingham, Board member for Magic City Poetry Festival, member of National Association of Book Critics and member of the American Literary Translator’s Association. She’s been a finalist for various things, including the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, the 2019 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, and he 2019 Frank McCourt Prize, and is currently working on a novel-like creature (among others).