Please join MWPA and PRINT: A Bookstore for a special event at Mechanics' Hall featuring Maya Williams and their debut collection, Judas & Suicide (Game Over Books, 2023). Maya will be joined by the poets Ian-Khara Ellasante, Katya Zinn, and Catherine Weiss for a reading and conversation.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet and host of Poetry Unbound, writes, “In dexterous form, through multiple voices, registers and allusions, Maya Williams asserts a vibrant poetry that has, at its core, understood itself, and asks to be understood.”
This is a free event, and we ask that you please RSVP and save your seat by clicking on the orange button.
If you would like to tune into this event on Zoom, please click on the registration button below. Please note that we cannot promise perfect video and sound quality, but hopefully it will be good enough to experience the event.
Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently the seventh poet laureate of Portland. May 2023 marks the release of their debut poetry collection, Judas & Suicide, via Game Over Books. October 2023 marks the release of their second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date, via Harbor Editions. They were one of three artists of color selected to represent Maine in The Kennedy Center's Arts Across America series in 2020 and were listed as one of The Advocate's Champions of Pride in 2022. She is currently an Ashley Bryan Fellow through the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. You can follow more of eir work at mayawilliamspoet.com
Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary parent, partner, poet, and cultural studies scholar. Ian-Khara’s poetry has been published in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Pipe Wrench, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut, Hinchas de Poesía, The Volta, Writing the Land: Maine, and From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast. Ian-Khara is a VONA alum whose awards and honors include the 2023 Cave Canem Fellowship, the New Millennium Award for Poetry, the Ashley Bryan Fellowship, and the Point Foundation Scholarship. Their critical writing, including the essay “Dear Trans Studies, Can You Do Love?,” has appeared in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Families in Society. Proudly hailing from Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and most recently, in southern Maine, where they teach Gender and Sexuality Studies and Africana at Bates College.
Catherine Weiss is a poet and artist from Deer Isle. Their poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Up the Staircase, Fugue, perhappened, Birdcoat, Bodega, Counterclock, petrichor, HAD, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Flypaper Lit. Catherine is the artist behind the collaborative poetry chapbook/card deck I WISH I WASN’T ROYALTY (Game Over Books, 2020). They are also the author of chapbook-length poem FERVOR (Ginger Bug Press, 2021), full-length poetry collections WOLF GIRLS VS. HORSE GIRLS (Game Over Books, 2021), and GRIEFCAKE (Game Over Books, 2023). More at catherineweiss.com.
Katya Zinn is a Boston-based, LA-born-and-raised performance poet, educator, and activist. Their first chapbook-length collection human verses was released in 2021. When not shouting poems to mostly-strangers at local dives, she works as a teaching artist and equity director of a children’s education nonprofit, where she’s working on starting a scholarship program to provide free therapeutic mentorship in the arts to neurodivergent children from low-income backgrounds. Zinn is currently the self-appointed poet laureate of Chuck E. Cheese, but hopes to make the title official (as soon as she can get Charles to respond to one of her tweets). Manic-depressive Pixie Dream Girl is their first full-length collection, for which she spent last summer on a national release tour. Find Katya on most social media under @zinnvisibleink, or by performing a simple conjuring spell at the next full moon.