Sunday’s event was a powerful reunion of creators and ideas, and we're still reeling from the artful wisdom imparted by Ashley M. Jones, Alison Grace Koehler, Fork Burke, Che Yeun, Malik Ameer Crumpler, and Jennifer Huang. If you weren't able to make the online reading, you can watch -after Thoughts: On Literary Homage & Ancestry on YouTube. We promise you're going to want to enter this realm! Many continued thanks to the Manderley Collective and to those who attended in real time.
An Afternoon / Evening with Verse of April & Manderley Collective, Sunday, May 17, 2020
Verse of April is honored to have been invited to collaborate in a special online event with the Manderley Collective. Please join Editor-in-Chief Carrie Chappell and past contributors Fork Burke, Malik Ameer Crumpler, Jennifer Huang, Ashley M. Jones, Alison Grace Koehler, and Che Yeun on Sunday, May 17, 2020, for an afternoon/evening (depending on your time zone) of conversation around literary homage and ancestry. All who wish to attend must RSVP here.
The Readers:
Fork Burke is a poet currently living in Switzerland. Recent poems of hers have been included in Tsunami Gang, Maintenant: A Journal Of Contemporary DADA Writing and Art, Those That This. Her spoken word album, Durch die Blumen, released in 2015. She has published two books: Licking Glass and #33 Checklist. She is Co-Editor of I Will Be Different Every Time: Black Women In Biel. More about her current and upcoming projects can be found on her website.
Malik Ameer Crumpler is a poet, rapper, composer, music producer and editor who has released several albums, glitch art films, five poetry books, and one book of raps. He is the Poetry Editor and a Co-Host of Paris Lit Up, Editor-At-Large of The Opiate, and Co-Founder of Those That This. Malik has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from L.I.U. Brooklyn. He is also the M.C. for Hip Hop group, Madison Washington on Def Pressé. Beneath The Underground: Collected Raps 2000-2018 is Malik’s most recent release, and ((((FACTS))))) is Madison Washington’s latest album.
Jennifer Huang is a Taiwanese-American writer, teacher, and artist from Rockville, Maryland. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she recently received an M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. Her essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She also serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor for Sundog Lit.
Ashley M. Jones is the author of Magic City Gospel and dark / / thing. Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her poems and essays appear widely. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, co-directs PEN Birmingham, and is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival.
Alison Grace Koehler is a stained glass poet. She makes windows, breaks glass, and solders poems into different spaces. This may be as performance or inside permanent and transient installations, exhibitions, and publications. Some of these spaces have included Cité International des Arts, The Edinburgh Art Festival, Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Irruzinoi, Espace Christiane Peugeot, Carbone 17, Berkeley Books of Paris, Tamaas, and The Bloomsday Festival. Alison lives in Paris and has recently published her first book, Stained Glass Poetry. Her work can be found on her website or @alisongracekoehler (Instagram / Facebook) and @AGraceColor (Twitter).
Che Yeun is a fiction writer from Seoul, Korea. Her work has been published in Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, and she is a Hedgebrook alumna. She is currently based in Boston, where she works as a historian of science and medicine.
The Guest Host:
Carrie Chappell is from Birmingham, Alabama. Some of her poems have appeared in Nashville Review, Redivider, SWIMM, and Yemassee. Her lyric and book essays have been published in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Fanzine, The Iowa Review, The Rupture, and Xavier Review. Currently, she serves as Poetry Editor for Sundog Lit and lives in Paris, France. She founded Verse of April there in 2015 as a way to contemporize expressions of poetic tribute in a digital anthology of homage to the poets, the poem.