Public Poetry Reading Series Featuring Raneem Bakir Alia, Jeremy Eugene, Lupe Mendez, Kaitlin Rizzo

Join us IN-PERSON at the Alief Neighborhood Center on March 2, from 2-4pm, for our monthly poetry reading and open mic! Our host Võ Đức Quang will introduce our featured poets: Raneem Bakir Alia, Jeremy Eugene, Lupe Mendez, Kaitlin Rizzo. And of course, all attendees are welcome to join the open mic portion of the event to read one poem.

Reading Location:
Alief Neighborhood Center
Alief-David M. Henington Regional Library
11903 Bellaire Blvd, Houston, TX 77072
Stairatorium area

Many thanks to the Houston Public Library for their ongoing partnership and support of this reading series. This event is funded in part by The City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.

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READER BIOS:

Born in Houston, Raneem Bakir Alia was raised in Texas, and lived abroad during her adolescence. Alia is a Moroccan-Palestinian American whose research is centered on North African and Middle Eastern history, liberation and anti-colonial movements analyzed through a gendered lens. In 2020, Bakir Alia was awarded a Mellon Research Scholar Fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in which she was awarded a grant to continue her research on revolution, liberation, and a gendered view of identity formation in the Moroccan Liberation Movement. She is formerly a poetry and prose editor at Glass Mountain Magazine, the Undergraduate Literary Magazine at the University of Houston.

Originally from Galveston, TX, Lupe Mendez (Writer//Educator//Activist) is the author WHY I AM LIKE TEQUILA (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the founder of Tintero Projects which works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Texas Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub. Lupe earned his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at El Paso and his work can been seen in print and online formats including the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast Journal, the Texas Review, the L.A. Review of Books, Split This Rock, Poetry Magazine and Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets. Mendez is the 2022-2023 Texas Poet Laureate.

Kaitlin Rizzo- Kaitlin Rizzo is a writer, researcher, and translator working on a series of projects related to the life of Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. Last year, she was a Finalist for the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. Her writing can be found forthcoming in Plume and the anthology Shreela Ray: On the Life and Work of an American Master, published by Pleiades, Copper Nickel, and Gulf Coast presses. She lives and teaches in Houston, where she is a Co-President and Founder of the Adjunct English Society, which advocates for sustainable wages for contingent faculty at the University of Houston.

Jeremy Eugene is a poet and educator currently teaching high school English. He is of Trinidadian heritage and resides in Houston. He is a two-time member of the nationally-acclaimed Houston VIP Poetry Slam team. His work has appeared in The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies and is forthcoming in Carceral Liberalism. He hopes to inspire and motivate social change with all of his work.