Join us for an evening of poetry and conversation celebrating National Poetry Month featuring award-winning poets Manuel Iris, Kristen Renzi, and Felicia Zamora. Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate Yalie Saweda Kamara will host the evening.

Free and open to the public. Registration required. To attend online, register directly via Crowdcast HERE.

Manuel Iris (Mexico, 1983). Mexican-born American Poet. Current Writer-in-Residence of the Cincinnati and Hamilton County public library (2023), and Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Cincinnati, Ohio (2018-2020). Winner of the “Merida” National award of poetry (Mexico, 2009) for his book Notebook of dreams, and the Rodulfo Figueroa Regional award of poetry for his book The disguises of fire (Mexico, 2014). In 2021, he became a member of the prestigious System of Art Creators of Mexico (Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte). Manuel Iris holds a BA in Latin American Literature from the Autonomous University of the Yucatan (Mexico), a MA in Spanish from the New Mexico State University, and a PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Cincinnati, the city in which he lives.

Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021) and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, a 2022 Tin House Next Book Residency, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.

Kristen Renzi is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Race, Intersectionality, Gender and Sociology Department at Xavier University; she researches and teaches in the areas of transatlantic modern literature, literature and science, performance studies, queer and feminist theory, visual media, and creative writing. She is the author of two books of poetry, The God Games (Main Street Rag Press, 2017) and Saudade for a Breaking Heart (Dos Madres, 2022), as well as a critical monograph, An Ethic of Innocence: Pragmatism, Modernity, and Women’s Choice Not to Know (SUNY Press, 2019). She lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children.

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Selected as the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term), she is the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration (The Hawkins Project, 2022) and the author of A Brief Biography of My Name (African Poetry Book Fund/Akashic Books, 2018) and When the Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017). Winner of the 2023 Elizabeth Alexander Award for Poetry and 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize, her forthcoming debut full-length poetry collection, Besaydoo, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. Kamara earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She resides in Cincinnati. For more, visit her website: www.yaylala.com

National Poetry Month Reading and Conversation