*Please be advised, this program contains explicit content and is recommended for audiences 18 years of age and above.*

City of Asylum has swan-dived into our archives to bring you some of our most memorable programs for our new series "Staff Pick Favorites." Tonight, we'll be revisiting two different literary evenings with acclaimed poets sam sax and Julian Randall in a poetry reading compilation.

This program is in proud partnership with Costura Creative, and is an intimate opportunity to listen to excerpts from urgent poems about identity, Blackness, mental health, LGBTQIA, pop culture, politics, addiction, desire, and other lived experiences from award-winning poets.

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago, and is the son of an African American father and a Dominican mother. His breakout poetry collection Refuse is a reflection on this dual identity, set against the backdrop of Obama’s America. Julian explores the relationship between himself and his father amidst their shared history of grief and inherited Black trauma. Julian invokes mythical figures such as Icarus, Narcissus and the absent Frank Ocean to create contemporary allegories about what it means to be Black, biracial, and queer today. Refuse, is the winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall 2018.

sam sax is a queer, Jewish, writer & educator. He is the author of Madness,  winner of The National Poetry Series selected by Terrance Hayes. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems in BuzzFeed, The Nation, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & other journals. sam is also the recipient of the 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. In his ­­­powerful debut collection, Madness, sam sax attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.

Costura Creative is a Latinx owned & operated talent agency representing contemporary poets & writers for speaking engagements, readings, workshops, multi-disciplinary collaborations & more.

Staff Pick Favorite: Poets sam sax & Julian Randall