Dear Friends,
We are so happy to welcome these six brilliant authors to the Birds, LLC family: Harmony Holiday, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kinga Tóth, Precious Okoyomon, Jessica Q. Stark, and Kelin Loe!!!
Six vital new books, forthcoming in 2019-20!!!
A JAZZ FUNERAL FOR UNCLE TOM
Harmony Holiday is the author of four collections of poetry Negro League Baseball, Go Find Your Father/ A Famous Blues, and Hollywood Forever. She is also the founder of Mythscience, an arts collective devoted to cross-disciplinary work that honors and explores the function of the black body in the capitalist system, and demands new levels of autonomy and creative freedom. Harmony also runs and founded Afrosonics an archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics. She worked on the SOS, the selected poems of Amiri Baraka, transcribing all of his poetry recorded with jazz that had yet to be released in print and exists primarily on out-of-print records. Harmony studied rhetoric and at UC Berkeley and taught for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. She received her MFA from Columbia University and has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a NYFA fellowship. She is currently working on a book of poems, as well as a separate book of lyric essays, both on Reparations and the body, and a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln.
while they sleep (under the bed is another country)
print by Mariana Ramos Ortiz
Raquel Salas Rivera es la poeta laureada de la ciudad de Filadelfia del 2018-19. Es la primera recipiente del Ambroggio Prize de la Academia de Poetas Americanos (Academy of American Poets) por su libro en español con traducciones al inglés, x/ex/exis. Sus poemas han aparecido en revistas tales como la Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Apogee y McSweeney’s. Cuenta con la publicación de seis plaquetas y cuatro poemarios. Su último libro, lo terciario/the tertiary, enfrenta la ley PROMESA y es finalista para el Premio Nacional del Libro del 2018 (2018 National Book Award). Del 2016-2018 fue co-editora de la revista literaria The Wanderer y co-editora de Puerto Rico en mi corazón, una colección bilingüe de volantes de poetas puertorriqueños contemporáneos. Este verano trabajó junto con Raena Shirali, Kirwyn Sutherland y Ashley Davis, organizando un festival llamado We (Too) Are Philly e inspirado por el poema “I, Too” de Langston Hughes. Ama y vive por Puerto Rico, Filadelfia y un mundo libre de la supremacía blanca.
Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the first recipient of the Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets for their dual-language book x/ex/exis. Their work has appeared in journals such as the The Journal of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña), Apogee, and McSweeney’s. They are the author of six chapbooks as well as four full-length poetry books. Their latest book, lo terciario/the tertiary, confronts the PROMESA bill and was recently on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist. From 2016-2018, they were co-editor of The Wanderer and co-editor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of bilingual broadsides of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. This summer, they spent countless hours alongside Raena Shirali, Kirwyn Sutherland, and Ashley Davis organizing a festival called We (Too) Are Philly, inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem, “I, Too.” They love and live for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy.
PARTY
Kinga Tóth (poet, translator, illustrator, songwriter, performer; Hungary) has published six poetry books, all self-illustrated. Her visual poetry has been exhibited widely; she is the lead singer of the experimental band Tóth Kína Hegyfalu and is working on the visual/sound/poetry projects X and [Moonlight Faces], for which she received the 2017 Hazai Attila award.
BUT DID U DIE
Precious Okoyomon is a queer poet, artist, and performer living in New York. She is the author of “Ajebota” (Bottlecap Press, 2016). Her writing has been performed and exhibited at the Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Exo Exo in Paris, and Moma ps1 in New York. Her writing has been published in numerous places including The Believer, Lambda Literary, and in Best American Experimental Writing 2019. She loves her sweet toy poodle rainbow and is a Leo that is very low key evil.
SAVAGE PAGENT
Jessica Q. Stark is a mixed-race Vietnamese American poet from Southern California who lives in Durham, North Carolina. She is a PhD Candidate in the English department at Duke University where she writes on the intersections between poetry and comics. Her poetry and/or illustrations have been published most recently by Glass Poetry Journal, The Operating System, Lute & Drum, Potluck, and others. Her poetry chapbook, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for Heavy Feather Review's Double Take Poetry Prize in 2016. She writes an ongoing love poetry zine for the Internet called INNANET and curates the Little Corner Poetry Reading Series.
THE NEW FATE OF KELIN LOE
Kelin Loe is the author of These Are The Gloria Stories (Factory Hollow Press 2014) and the chapbook The Motorist (minutesBOOKS 2010). Her poetry and criticism can be found in jubilat, Sink Review, iO, Epiphany Magazine, Octopus Magazine and others. Her chapter "'Let's Listen With Our Feet': Animals (Non/Human, Neurodivergent), Vulnerability, and Haptic Rhetoricity" is included in the edited collection Rhetorical Animals: Boundaries of the Human in the Study of Persuasion (Lexington Books 2017). She earned her MFA (2012) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is currently a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition. She lives in Northampton, MA, with her husband and service dog.
Stay tuned for pre-sale and launch details!!!
And if you're interested in reviewing or teaching any of these books or inviting any of these authors to read near you or visit your class, please contact us at editor@birdsllc.com!!!
Love,
The Editors