Join us on April 28th at Silvana for what promises to be a very special night featuring writers and exceptional literary citizens Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Jericho Brown, Veronica Liu, Holly Masturzo, Willie Perdomo, and Alexandra Watson. Brown and Perdomo will be celebrating the release of their new books of poems The Tradition and The Crazy Bunch respectively. Word Up Books is our official bookseller for the night. Plan to be with us Sunday, April 28th  at Silvana in Harlem from 6:00pm-8:00pm. 300 W 116th St (SW corner of 116th and Frederick Douglass Blvd). The First Person Plural Reading Series is hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Admission is free! There will be cake! Here is more information about our stellar readers:

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician and writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, The Millions, Joyland, largehearted boy, Chattahoochee Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, jellyfish review, aaduna and elsewhere, with poetry in Cutthroat, sidereal, Natural Bridge, apt magazine, Hobart, Ithaca Lit, Quiddity and elsewhere. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. In addition to the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection prize under which her debut collection White Dancing Elephants was released in October 2018, she recently received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a Henfield award for her writing. Her work received several Pushcart Prize anthology nominations this year as well as a Joy Harjo Poetry Contest prize. Follow her on Twitter at @chayab77 including for upcoming readings and events.
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019). His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Veronica Liu is a writer and editor, and her writing, comics, photography, and silkscreen prints have been published in Broken Pencil, Quick Fiction, In/Context, Mom Egg Review, We’ll Never Have Paris and other journals and zines. She has been involved in community arts organizing for 24 years, most recently as founder and general coordinator of the 60-person collective that operates Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria in Washington Heights. The cofounder of an online radio station and the community publisher Fractious Press, Veronica has received individual grants for writing, the development of an arts and music fair, a video series, and various publishing projects. Prior to becoming Word Up’s first (and, still, only) paid staff member, she was a contributing editor at Seven Stories Press, where she worked as managing then senior editor for more than a decade.

A recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the Houston Arts Alliance, Holly Masturzo’s writing has appeared in Voices of Italian Americana, Ars Medica, Third Mind: Creative Writing & Visual Art, and The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing and has been performed at a variety of sites including museums and on the radio. She is Professor of Humanities and Women’s Studies at Florida State College and serves on the Board of Directors of the Jacksonville Dance Theater.

Willie Perdomo is the author of The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Poets, 2019) The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Poets, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the International Latino Book Award; Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2004), winner of the PEN Open Book Award, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (Norton, 1996), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, Poetry, Bomb Magazine, and African Voices. He is currently a Lucas Arts Program Literary Fellow and teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Alexandra Watson is the executive editor of Apogee Journal, where she has secured grant funding for community arts projects from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is a full-time Lecturer in the English department at Barnard College. Her fiction, poetry, and interviews have appeared in Nat. Brut., Redivider, PANK, Lit Hub, and Apogee. She’s the recipient of the 2019 PEN/Nora Magid Prize for Literary Magazine editing.