We at First Person Plural are thrilled to announce that our second reading this season is in partnership with Belladonna Collaborative and features three stellar poets: r. erica doyle, Tonya Foster, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. The Belladonna* mission is to “promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable and dangerous with language.” This is a mission we wholeheartedly support! Join us at 7:00pm on Tuesday, October 15 at Shrine in Harlem. As always, admission is free.
r. erica doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and her first book, proxy, was published by Belladonna Books in 2013. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Ploughshares, Bloom, Blithe House Quarterly and Sinister Wisdom.
She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Erica is a Cave Canem Fellow and received her MFA in Poetry from The New School. She lives in New York City, where she is an administrator in the NYC public schools and facilitates Tongues Afire: A Free Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people of color.
Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals. Tonya has worked as a teacher at City College’s Bridge to Medicine Program, the Saturday/Outreach Program at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Middle School Program at Wadleigh Middle School.
The author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (forthcoming from Belladonna Press/Futurepoem Books) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002), her research interests include 19th and 20th century poetries of the Americas; 20th century poetics; the poetics and politics of space; African diaspora fiction; and Afro-futurism; and dystopias.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is a writer, vocalist and the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Her poetry has been published in Ploughshares, Jubilat, Fence, Rattapallax, Nocturnes, and LA Review. She has received awards from Cave Canem, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, New York Foundation for the Arts, Harlem Community Arts Fund, Jerome Foundation, Barbara Deming Memorial Grant, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is a native of Harlem.