Past Pairings
Kamilah Aisha Moon meets Jeremy Michael Clark on May 28, 2017!
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Page Meets Stage takes place at The Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just south of Bleecker St.) starting promptly at 6:00 pm! Tickets are available here.
Kamilah Aisha Moon has received fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Prague Summer Writing Institute, Hedgebrook and Cave Canem. Her work has been featured widely, including Harvard Review, Oxford American, and Prairie Schooner. Her poetry collection, She Has a Name (Four Way Books, 2013), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle. A Pushcart Prize winner and a 2015 New American Poet presented by the Poetry Society of America, Moon has taught English and Creative Writing for many organizations and institutions, most recently as a Visiting Professor at Rutgers-Newark. Her next poetry collection is forthcoming in 2017 from Four Way Books.
Jeremy Michael Clark is from Louisville, Kentucky. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Horsethief, Nashville Review, Prelude, The Rumpus, Washington Square Review, Vinyl, & elsewhere. He is both a Cave Canem & Callaloo Fellow, and has received scholarships from The Conversation Literary Festival, The Fine Arts Work Center, and Squaw Valley. Jeremy currently lives in New York, and is an MFA candidate & teaching assistant at Rutgers University-Newark.
Jive Poetic meets Omar Holmon on April 23, 2017!
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Because the last pairing sold out completely, we now strongly recommend all interested audience members to buy an advance ticket (for a discount!).
Page Meets Stage takes place at The Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just south of Bleecker St.) starting promptly at 6:00 pm! Tickets are available here.
Jive Poetic received his BA in Media Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has performed his work in venues ranging from the Australian House of Parliament to the Tom Thumb Theater in Kent, England. He was also one of two poets selected by the US Embassy to represent American slam poetry during an international cultural exchange program in Warsaw, Poland. Jive Poetic has collected grand slam championship titles from Pensacola, Florida to Munich, Germany. In 2003, Jive Poetic was a member of the Nuyorican Poet’s Café’s National Slam team ranking second in the nation as a team, and 10th as an individual. In 2004, he was a member of the Providence Rhode Island Slam Team; in 2005 he was a member of the NYC Louder Arts Slam Team; in 2006 he was a member of the Brooklyn National Slam Team. In 2011 he served on the advisement panel at the Australian National Slam Summit. He was featured on season four of TVONE’s LEXUS VERSES AND FLOW. He is the co-founder of The SOUNDBITES POETRY FESTIVAL, the only performance poetry festival in New York City, and currently hosts the open slam at Nuyorican Poet’s Café. When he is not on tour or hosting, Jive Poetic teaches performance poetry and hip – hop workshops to at risk youth in New York City and surrounding tri-state area. Recently, Jive released his third poetry album, PERPENDICTIVE, and is currently an MFA candidate in The Pratt Institute’s creative writing and activism program.
Omar Holmon started out doing poetry just to see what he could get away with saying at upscale events. After 6 years he has represented New Jersey (Loserslam) and New York (Nuyorican & Urbana) at the National Poetry Slam. Omar has been on final stage at Nationals (placing second in 2014) and Rustbelt. He has also been on Ted X, Button Poetry, Verses and Flow, and even a commercial for Laphroaig whiskey. All of which is to say ya mans is nice and ain’t much else to prove. Omar can be found contributing essays on Black Nerd Problems, a website he co-founded with Will Evans. Meaning, whenever you see a nerd talking comics or cartoons, look in their fandom… you’ll see Omar.
September 25, 2016: Aracelis Girmay met Camonghne Felix
Tonight we return to where Page Meets Stage began years ago, The Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just south of Bleecker St.). Take note of the new start time—6:00 pm! Tickets are available here.
Born and raised in Santa Ana, California, poet Aracelis Girmay earned a BA at Connecticut College and an MFA from New York University. Her poems trace the connections of transformation and loss across cities and bodies. Her poetry collections include Teeth (2007), Kingdom Animalia (2011), and The Black Maria (2016), named a “Top Poetry Pick” by Publisher’s Weekly, O Magazine, and Library Journal. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing (2005).
Recently listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl From the Future You Should Know,” Camonghne Felix is a poet, speaker, organizer, an MFA Candidate at Bard College, an MA Candidate in Arts Politics at NYU, a 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee, and the 2013 recipient of the Cora Craig Award for Young Women. She is an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder of Firefly Brigade. You can find her work in various spaces, including Youtube, and publications like Apogee, Union Station, Poetry Magazine, Teen Vogue and Hugfington Post. She is also the author of the chapbook Yolk, published via Penmanship Books 2015.
Valzhyna Mort met Ramya Ramana on November 27, 2016
Valzhyna Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus, made her American debut in 2008 with the poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press), co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright. Her second book is Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).
Ramya Ramana, 21, is an author, poet and student at St. John’s University. She recently published her first manuscript, Don’t Drown Her in the Baptism with Penmanship Books.
Evie Shockley met Yesenia Montilla on October 23, 2016!
Tonight we return to where Page Meets Stage began years ago, The Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just south of Bleecker St.). Take note of the new start time—6:00 pm! Tickets are available here.
Evie Shockley is the author of four collections of poetry—most recently, the new black, winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry—as well as a critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Her poetry and essays appear widely in journals and anthologies. Her honors include the 2015 Stephen Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry and the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize. Currently serving as creative editor for Feminist Studies, Shockley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina from New York City. A graduate of Drew University’s Poetry & Poetry in Translations MFA program & a Canto Mundo Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in The Wide Shore, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast & others. Her first collection of poetry: The Pink Box is published by Willow Books & was long-listed for the PEN America Open Book Award.
John Murillo Meets Caits Meissner on May 11, 2016
The son of an African-American father and a Mexican mother, poet and playwright John Murillo grew up in Los Angeles. He was educated at Howard University and New York University, where he earned an MFA. Murillo makes use of both formal and free verse as he engages themes of family history and personal identity. In a Q&A with the Poetry Society of America, Murillo states, “I write, first of all, in the tradition of the witness.”
Murillo’s debut poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie (2010) was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and was also named one of Huffington Post’s “Ten Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now.” Murillo’s poetry has also been included in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry (2013, edited by Charles Henry Rowell). His choreo-play Trigger premiered with the Edgeworks Dance Theater in 2011.
Murillo’s additional honors include two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the New York Times. Murillo lives in Brooklyn.
Caits Meissner is a poet and transformative facilitator invested in the rehabilitative capacity of art. Her poems have been published in various journals and anthologies including Drunken Boat, Duende, The Offing, Radius, The Feminist Wire, Amazon.com’s Day One and The Literary Review.
Neil Hilborn met Jared Singer on April 13, 2016
Neil Hilborn is a College National Poetry Slam champion and a 2011 graduate with honors from Macalester College. In 2013, his poem “OCD” went viral, garnering over ten million views, making it one of the most-viewed slam poems ever. He has performed in 37 states and four countries, and he is the author of Our Numbered Days on Button Poetry Press. Originally from Houston, Texas, he now lives in St Paul, Minnesota.
Jared Singer is a poet and audio engineer who lives in New York City. While he may have physically grown up with his peers, he has never forgotten the imagination, magic, and nerdiness that were corner stones of his childhood. He hopes to remind others of these more creative times. He is a well respected poetry organizer, mentor, and coach.
Page Meets Stage 