JAC Talk: Poetry Reading

In celebration of National Poetry Month, three acclaimed poets will read from their selected works
Introductions by Jared White, co-owner of Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop.
An open discussion with the audience will follow the readings.
ABOUT THE POETS

Kate Colby’s books of poetry include I Mean and Reverse Engineer. Paradoxx is forthcoming from Essay Press. She has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Dodd Research Center at University of Connecticut, and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Harper’s, Lana Turner, LitHub and The Nation.

Colby was a founding board member of the Gloucester Writers Center in Massachusetts, where she now serves on the advisory board. She grew up in Massachusetts and currently lives in Providence, where she teaches at Brown and UPenn, and performs with the ad hoc poets’ theater group, Spatulate Church Emergency Shift.


Jenn Marie Nunes is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: LIKE ME (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2025), Those People (Dog’s Heart Press, 2020), winner of the National Poetry Review Press Book Prize, and AND/OR (Switchback Books, 2015), winner of the Switchback books Queer Voices Award. Her poetry and translations have been featured in numerous journals, including Denver Quarterly, Asian American Writer’s Workshop: The Margins, Asymptote Blog, Verse Daily, BAX Best American Experimental Writing, Action Yes!, Tupelo Quarterly, andSixth Finch. She is currently finishing up a PhD in contemporary Chinese literature at OSU, and her English translation of Taiwanese poet Yen Ai-lin’s collection Bone, Skin, Flesh 《故皮肉》is forthcoming from Balestier Press.


Ada Smailbegović is a poet and theorist born in Sarajevo and living in a series of geographical displacements between Providence, Vancouver and New York. She is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, nonhuman forms of materiality, histories of description, and the natural sciences. She is a cofounder of The Organism for Poetic Research. Select critical and poetic works have included “Of Poodles, Mockingbirds and Beetles: Gertrude Stein’s Zoopoetics” (College Literature, 2019), “From Code to Shape” (differences, 2018), The Forest / On Waiting (Doublecross Press, 2017), “Cloud Writing” (Art in the Anthropocene, 2015) and “Of the Dense and Rare” (Triple Canopy, 2013). Her book Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds was published by Columbia University Press in 2021.