April 25 at 7pm in the Pine Room at Paul Smith’s College
April 26 at 7pm in S-19 at North Country Community College
Presented by Adirondack Center for Writing & Planned Parenthood of North Country NY. Larger than life performance poets Mahogany L. Browne, Carlos Andrés Goméz, Jon Sands, and Sofía Snow will perform their work, and engage in discussion with audience members. Free and open to the public in support of national poetry and sexual assault awareness month. Optional writing workshop with poets to follow performance. With special thanks to: North Country Community College Student Government Association (SGA), Paul Smith’s College, Planned Parenthood Sexual Assault Services.
About the Poets
Mahogany L. Browne The Cave Canem and Poets House alumnae is the author of several books including Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution & About.com Best Poetry Books of 2010. She has released five LPs including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off Broadway poetry production, Jam On It, and co-producer of NYC’s 1st Performance Poetry Festival: SoundBites Poetry Festival, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Browne has toured Germany, Amsterdam, England, Canada and recently Australia as 1/3 of the cultural arts exchange project Global Poetics. Her journalism work has been published in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada’s The Word and UK’s MOBO. Her poetry has been published in literary journals Pluck, Manhattanville Review, Muzzle, Union Station Mag, Literary Bohemian, Bestiary, Joint & The Feminist Wire. She is anticipating the release of several poetry collections in 2015: Smudge (Button Poetry), Redbone (Willow Books) & the anthology The Break Beat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket). She is an Urban Word NYC mentor, as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. Brown is also the publisher of Penmanship Books, the Nuyorican Poets Café Poetry Program Director and Friday Night Slam curator and currently an MFA Candidate for Writing & Activism at Pratt Institute. Follow Mahogany L. Browne on twitter & instagram: @mobrowne
Carlos Andrés Goméz is an award-winning poet, actor, speaker, and writer from New York City. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of the coming-of-age memoir Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood, released by Penguin Random House. Named 2016 Best Diversity Artist by Campus Activities Magazine and Artist of the Year at the 2009 Promoting Outstanding Writers Awards, Carlos costarred in Spike Lee’s #1 movie Inside Man with Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, and Clive Owen. Winner of the 2015 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the 2015 Makeda Bilqis Literary Award, Carlos is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), and the Jerome Foundation. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Muzzle, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Sunday Times, The Huffington Post, Timeout New York, The Guardian, Philadelphia Stories, Radius, decomP and elsewhere.
Jon Sands is a writer known for electric readings, and the author of The New Clean (2011, Write Bloody Publishing). His work has been featured in The New York Times, published widely in various journals, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2014. He starred in the award winning web-series Verse: A Murder Mystery from Rattapallax Films, is the co-founder of Poets in Unexpected Places, and a facilitator with the Dialogue Arts Project. He is a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC, and teaches creative writing for adults at both Bailey House in Harlem (an HIV/AIDS service center) and the Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange in Manhattan). He tours extensively, but lives in Brooklyn.
Sofía Snow is a Boston-raised spoken word artist, educator, and community organizer, and is the Deputy Director for Urban Word NYC. Her work has been featured in a range of literary publications, as well as in The Boston Globe, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Generation Progress, and elsewhere. Prior to her arrival in New York, Sofía was the Outreach Coordinator for the University of Wisconsin’s pioneering First Wave program, the world’s first and only full-tuition scholarship program for hip hop and urban arts. http://www.sofiasnow.com.