AWP
122AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level
Philadelphia, PA 19107
United States
The poets in this reading, with recent books published by Milkweed Editions, all illustrate in varying ways the press’s ongoing commitment to art that uses language to trouble and interrogate the status quo. Our poetries are radical, queer, disabled, genre-bending. We seek to celebrate our power as creators—come join us!
Nicky Beer
Nicky Beer is the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes. She is a bi/queer writer, and the author of two other collections of poems, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House, both winners of the Colorado Book Award.
Benjamin Garcia
Benjamin Garcia’s first collection of poems, Thrown in the Throat, was selected for the 2019 National Poetry Series by Kazim Ali. He currently works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. He is the author of Dēmos, Colonize Me and Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot, winners and finalists of over a dozen awards.
Michael Kleber-Diggs
Michael Kleber-Diggs’s debut collection of poems, Worldly Things, won the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He was born and raised in Kansas and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, the Rumpus, Rain Taxi, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Water~Stone Review, Midway Review, North Dakota Quarterly and a few anthologies. Michael teaches poetry and creative non-fiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.
torrin a. greathouse
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk and MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. In 2020, they received fellowships from Zoeglossia and the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?
Thrown in the Throat is a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times.
From the intersection of Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian cultures, this collection arrives brimming with personal and political histories.
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.
Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive.