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Tuesday, May 9th at 8pm ET / 5pm PT
Online Event (Zoom) - watch the recording
Join us online on May 9th at 8pm EST for an evening of live poetry, prose, and art from around the world. We'll be hosting a live virtual showcase via Zoom for our global community of readers.
Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook Character Flaws (Fauxmoir lit, 2023) is forthcoming and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection From the top of the sky about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com.
Heather Bourbeau’s poetry and fiction have appeared in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and SWWIM. She has written in Madagascar, read in Tunisia, and worked in Liberia. While drinking strong tea, she wonders where she will explore next. Her collection Some Days The Bird is a poetry conversation with the Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey (Beltway Editions, 2022). Her latest collection Monarch is a poetic memoir of overlooked histories from the US West she was raised in (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
Moni Brar was born in rural India and raised in northern British Columbia on the land of the Tse’Khene peoples. She has multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and was the recipient of the 2022 Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal and the 2022 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. A finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, she has received writing awards from PRISM, Grain, Room, The Fiddlehead, and The Ex-Puritan. Her work appears in Best Canadian Poetry, The Literary Review of Canada, Hobart, and elsewhere. She believes art contains the possibility of healing.
Adeet Deshmukh is a New York City based photographer and product manager. His images capture the interplay between light/shadow and emotion/composition—in the streets of Manhattan and Mumbai, in the faces of family and strangers, and in the fields of Iceland and the Midwest. Adeet has had shows in Chicago and New York, and his work has appeared in various print publications including Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Ponder Review, Burningworld Literary Journal, and Digging Press. Adeet has spoken at Pepperdine University's Seaver College on using visual content in marketing and PR campaigns. Most recently, his photography was featured in a group show at the CUSP Gallery in Provincetown. See more of his work at www.adeetdeshmukh.com.
Andrea Venson is a multi-faceted creative based in Houston, Texas. Her work uses vibrant colors and surreal compositions to explore the connection between spirituality, nature, and the human form. On top of her life as an artist, she guides meditation experiences in nature, has music on all streaming platforms, and teaches art at the middle school level. She has curated and participated in local and regional art shows, and continues to engage the community through thoughtful conversations and creative activations.
Sean Ennis is the author of CHASE US: Stories (Little A) and CUNNING, BAFFLING, POWERFUL (Thirty West). He lives in Mississippi where he is the Director of a software development bootcamp. More of his work can be found at seanennis.net
Karen Paul Holmes has two poetry books, No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin Books) and Untying the Knot (Kelsay Books). Her poems have been featured on The Writer's Almanac, The Slowdown, and Verse Daily. Publications include Diode, Plume, Valparaiso Review, and Prairie Schooner, and she was named a best emerging poet by Stay Thirsty Media. In 2022, Holmes was the Tweetspeak Poetry “Poet Laura” and a finalist for the Lascaux Review Poetry Prize.
David Samuel Hudson is a Maltese author. He is the recipient of a distinction in a creative writing Master's degree from Bath Spa University where his novel manuscript was shortlisted for the Janklow and Nesbit prize. As a journalist, he was awarded the national journalism prize for his investigative work. He was chosen as a National Book Prize adjudicator in 2020. He previously worked as an English teacher, copyeditor and translator. He is currently working as an administrator and content writer at the University of Malta. His fiction has won prizes in the United Kingdom and the United States and has been featured on Business Weekly, NPR, and the Chicago Review of Books. He is currently working on his novel debut.
The winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award for Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), selected by Lauren Camp, Jen Karetnick is the author of 10 additional poetry collections, including the chapbook What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, June 2024) and the 2021 CIPA EVVY Gold Medal winner The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020). Her work has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Wildacres Retreat, Mother's Milk Artist Residency, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in The American Poetry Review, Cold Mountain Review, Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Notre Dame Review, Shenandoah, South Dakota Review, and Tar River Poetry. See jkaretnick.com.
