Poetry for Hard Times: A Reading and Conversation
April may be the cruelest month, but it's also National Poetry Month! Join us for a poetry reading and discussion with four Brooklyn poets as they read and discuss the poems that have gotten them through hard times.
Rebecca Yeong Ae Mzengi Corey is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans poetry, visual art, filmmaking, and community building. Her practice moves fluidly between modes—creating, facilitating, curating, and stewarding—shifting in response to context, alignment, and emerging needs/desires. Asking questions about belonging and care run throughout her work, serving as both method and horizon for new ways of being. She currently serves as Deputy Director at Center for Book Arts.
@rebeccamzengicorey
R. Diskin Black is the author of two novels and the recently released poetry collection “The Night of Swaying Grass”. He lives in the West Village with his cat, Sebastian.
Malcolm Tariq is a poet, playwright, and scholar who grew up in Savannah, Georgia. He earned a BA and MA from Emory University and a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He is the author of Heed the Hollow (2019), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year Award, and Extended Play (2017). Tariq completed a playwriting apprenticeship at Horizon Theater Company, and was a 2020-2021 resident playwright with Liberation Theatre Company. A former programs manager for Cave Canem, he is a senior manager for Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America.
Brad Vogel is the author of the poetry collection Find Me in the Feral Pockets (Euphrosine, 2024), featured by The New Yorker in spring 2024, as well as the collection Broad Meadow Bird (Euphrosine, 2015). A finalist for the 2020 Erskine J. Prize, his poetry has been published in Evergreen Review; Smartish Pace; Griffel; The Freshwater Review; No, Dear; The Eel Pit; Solitary Plover, and more. Vogel organizes the annual NYC Poets Afloat residencies and reading series aboard vessels in NY Harbor (since 2019), as well as the annual Gowanus Dawn Reading in canoes (since 2017). He has led literary programming for NYU, the Center for Fiction, and Brooklyn Museum, and he serves on the board of the Walt Whitman Initiative.
