Please join us at 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 5, 2016, for readings by Khadijah Queen, Carolina Ebeid, and Vanessa Villarreal. This will be a book launch party for Khadijah Queen’s Fearful Beloved.

Khadijah Queen is the author of the poetry collections Conduit (Akashic Books 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011), Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015) and a verse play, Non-Sequitur, which won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers and was published by Litmus Press. The Relationship theater company staged a full production in December 2015 at Theaterlab NYC. Her fifth book, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and is due out from YesYes Books in 2017. Individual poems and prose appear in Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, Memoir, CURA, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Volta Book of Poets, The Force of What’s Possible and widely elsewhere. In 2016, she joined the new Mile-High MFA in creative writing program at Regis University as core faculty.

 Carolina Ebeid is a student in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Denver, and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. She has won fellowships and prizes from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and in 2015 was awarded an NEA Fellowship in poetry. Her first book will be published by Noemi Press’ Akrilica series. Recent work appears in The Volta, Colorado Review, and Linebreak, and is forthcoming in the newly revived Bennington Review, Western Humanities Review,  jubilat, and in the inaugural Ruth Stone Reader.

Vanessa Angelica Villarreal was born on the Rio Grande in McAllen, Texas. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, The Poetry Foundation Harriet blog, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, and her book, Beast Meridian, was a finalist at Nightboat, Futurepoem, Saturnalia, and Willow Books, and is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2017. She came up in Houston, Texas.