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LEAF Global Arts Presents
LEAF Lit Live!
Spoken-Word
Literary Poetry Salon #6
OUR THEME IS JUNETEENTH
Featured Poets
Starr Davis, Anna Limontas-Salisbury, C.R. Glasgow, Arriel Vinson
Hosted by S. Erin Batiste and James Navé
Thursday, June 24, 2021
7 PM ET • 6 PM CT • 5 PM MT • 4 PM PT
Join us on Facebook Live at LEAF Global Arts
https://www.facebook.com/theLEAF.org/
Join us on Facebook Live at LEAF Global Arts
https://www.facebook.com/theLEAF.org/
LEAF Lit Live!
Spoken-Word Literary Poetry Salon
We have the power to change
the end of the story.
Anna Aimontas-Salisbury
Anna Limontas-Salisbury is a New York City poet, writer, and educator.
Salisbury is a graduate of Hunter College and Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Her work as a multimedia freelance journalist focused on women marginalized by poverty. She produced stories for Women’s Enews and Brooklyn Independent Television simultaneously.
She’s been a featured poet at Camperdown, a poetry reading series at Halyards, Honey Dipped Productions, and Body Love Open Mic Series. Her poetry was also featured in the page to stage production Emotive Fruition’s Heartbreaker/ Verse Maker, Came Back With A Clap Back, and Let Lightning Set Us On Fire. She performed excerpts of her nonfiction essays with COUNTERpult-Reading Series and HTBAF: Honoring Our Ancestors by Open Source Gallery. She is also a contributing reviewer of poetry chapbooks for Mom Egg Review.
Salisbury is currently strengthening her artistic practice with the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, a professional development program for artists and cultural workers of African ancestry.
She is a recipient of Brooklyn Public Library’s BKLYN Incubator. This grant supported Echoes of Our Lives, a workshop for adult learners to write, publish and present their work to the community. Salisbury is currently strengthening her artistic practice with the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, a professional development program for artists and cultural workers of African ancestry.
Anna’s a Gen X mother to one Millennial daughter and Generation Z son. She is still processing motherhood in her newest role as Grand Diva to one granddaughter.
Here are the opening lines of Anna’s poem Call Your Mother: “Call your mother / Call your mother because she loves you / Call your mother because she loves you With an unguided love . . . “
Click HERE to read the poem on the page and to listen to Anna read it to you.
S. Erin Batiste, Emcee
S. Erin Batiste (she/her)
S. Erin Batiste (she/her) is an interdisciplinary poet, storyteller, and author of the chapbook Glory to All Fleeting Things. In 2021 this year, she is the recipient of PERIPLUS, Jack Straw Writers, and the dots between fellowships, and is a Writer in Residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA, Prairie Ronde, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.
Her other recent honors include fellowships and support from Cave Canem, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference–Rona Jaffe Foundation, Crosstown Arts, and Callaloo. Batiste is a reader for The Rumpus, and her own Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net nominated poems are anthologized and appear internationally in Michigan Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and wildness, among other decorated journals.
S. Erin Batiste does Black Women's work. Her chapbook, Glory to All Fleeting Things, declared as "unabashedly honest and honoring her whole truth," and a "daring testament to imagination making the road to freedom" deals with the major themes of Black femininity and feminism, inheritance, nostalgia, and mythology.
Batiste's interdisciplinary practice weaves together traditional verse, prose poems, memoir, inherited forms such as games and recipes alongside visually-driven works like erasure, collage, archives, and other ephemera to trace her matrilineage and interrogate the Black middle class and its devastating domestic failure.
Her poetry accepts the difficult calling of being both canary and witness–looking deeply through the eyes and rendering speakers who reside at the margins of the strange, terrifying, and magnificent space of being born Black, born Woman, born Creative.
Batiste is currently at work on her first full-length poetry collection, Hoard, which examines the aftermath of the '1980s and '1990s era of malls and suburbs, consumption, late capitalism, Americana, and the Black American nuclear family. The places and people who remain, how we make a life beyond.
Starr Davis
IG: @poetess1 (IG) / Twitter: @_starrdavis
Starr Davis
Starr Davis is a Houston based poet and essayist whose work has been featured in multiple literary venues such as The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Rumpus, So to Speak, and Transition. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York and a BA in journalism and creative writing from the University of Akron. She tutors marginalized groups of young African American female writers for the nonprofit organization Seeds of Fortune. She is the creative nonfiction editor for TriQuarterly.
Starr Davis on Star Davis: I am a poet and essayist. I am the Creative Nonfiction Editor for TriQuarterly Magazine. I tutor marginalized groups of young African American female writers for the nonprofit organization Seeds of Fortune. Besides literary publications, actress Phyllis Yvonne Stickney performed my piece titled “The Talk” at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn, NY.
I am a watcher of rerun sitcoms, old 90s films, and people. My hometown is Columbus, Ohio, but the first city on my lips will always be New York (Hey, what can I say? Columbus raised me, New York made me). I have more tattoos than I can count, but that has not stopped me from working successfully for a fortune 500 company on Wall Street. I named my studio apartment in the Bronx the Blue Bunker, and it went viral for being a navy-blue nest in the middle of a rough neighborhood. Interior design is my next career move.
Recently, my significant other called me a hoarder (this may be true). Some of my favorite books to read are fiction novels about crime, star-crossed love, and all things trauma.
C.R. Glasgow
C. R. Glasgow ( Doc) is a non-binary, queer, first-generation Afro-Caribbean. Doc serves as writer, psychologist, spiritual creative, and public speaker.
In their creative offerings, Doc compels the audience to feel the inseparability of the composer and audience through time-bending arresting imagery, daring questioning, bold answers, and abstract glimpses of the mundane. Doc is a 2021 Jack Straw Writer and has recent previous publications in Butch is Not a Dirty Word, Issue 6, “These Roots,” The Arrow Journal “Con*cept*ion” (Blogs & Essays -October 27, 2020) and upcoming pieces in anthologies Refuge in the Storm: Voices in Buddhist Crisis Care and Afrikan Wisdom: New Voices Speak Black Liberation, Buddhism and Beyond.
Doc on Doc: I am leading the hyphenated life as guided by Spirit. I am a hybrid poet, speaker, psychologist, teacher of many crafts, and chaplain/doula. As a non-binary, queer, first-generation being from Haitian and Trinidadian roots, liberatory views and dismantling constructs naturally flows through my veins as well as on the page.
Spirit has spoken through me since I was a child: through silence, through dreams, through tribulations, and through writing. As a “funny,” androgenous Black femme-bodied child, many of the information gathered from these technologies were kept secret. I have always had a deep sense of purpose with asking questions and being the keeper of story. As a youth, writing in particular served as a witness to my experience when there was none. As an adult, it has expanded to use these personal experiences as a portal to the lineage of Ancestors' experiences, allowing intersecting voices, time, imagery to become one. In particular, my work focuses on Trinidad and Haiti and the migration paths they took.
I am a practitioner of many contemplative forms including writing, meditation, yoga, jo, kyudo, and householder and always interested in learning others.
Arriel Vinson
Twitter and IG at @arriwrites
Arriel Vinson is a Tin House YA Scholar and Hoosier who writes about being young, Black, and in search of freedom. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Vinson's poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Kweli Journal, The Rumpus, Catapult, Waxwing, Electric Literature, and others. Her work has also been nominated for Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2019, and a Pushcart Prize. A Walter Grant recipient, she is also a 2019 Kimbilio Fellow and 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest semifinalist.
James Navé, emcee
James Navé
James Navé (he/him) has performed for the public well over 10,000 times over his long career as a poet, teacher, and storyteller. As co-founder of the landmark performance company Poetry Alive!, he memorized over 600 poems and has performed shows and workshops in the United States and International Schools throughout West Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe. Navé holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Navé has been the Poetry Slam emcee for Asheville, NC's LEAF Festival, and an advisory team of LEAF Global Arts since 1995. His latest book of poems, The 100 Days, will be published by 3: A Taos Press in late 2021. Navé once owned a pizza restaurant on the coast of Carolina, won a poetry slam at Chicago's Green Mill with a perfect 30 score, and camped out on a rooftop in Manhattan in mid-September so he could watch the Empire State Building, the full moon, and the World Trade Center's two beams of memorial light.
Support our Poets! Suggested donation for this event is 15 dollars, or what you can afford. Your donation will go directly to the poets. Thank you.