May 22, 3pm

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In conjunction with Meghan Cox's Hours and Hours solo show, Undercurrent would like to invite you to join a poetry reading event which will take place on May 22nd, 3pm. This is an outdoors event.

We are grateful to Sheila Maldonado for gathering an amazing group of poets, herself included.

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Sheila Maldonado is the author of the newly released poetry collection that's what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2021) as well as one-bedroom solo (Fly by Night Press / A Gathering of the Tribes, 2011), her debut poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Ping Pong, and Callaloo, and anthologized in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Brooklyn Poets Anthology and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She has served as an artist-in-residence on Governors Island, New York for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the U.S. State Department. She was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island, the daughter of Armando and Vilma of El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras. She lives in uptown Manhattan where she is working on an ongoing project about a lifelong obsession with the ancient Maya.

/@shelamal on instagram and twitter.

David Pemberton is a librarian at the School of Visual Arts where he’s worked since 2003. Based on his long-running series of poems about the life of images, he ran The Acidic Ghost Spectral Reading series, which featured literature performances incorporating projected media, from 2012 to 2018, mostly at the now-defunct Studio 26 Gallery in Manhattan. His publications include the journals A Gathering of the Tribes, Live Mag!, Lungfull!, Stretching Panties, and the anthologies From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream (Autonomedia) and You Are Here: New York City Streets in Poetry (P & Q Press). He has an MFA from The City College of New York and an MLS from the Pratt Institute. He is a husband, father of two, cub scout den leader, and cat companion in Maplewood, NJ. 

Poet, social worker, mama, and ex-wife are among the identities of Stella Padnos. Her poetry appears, or will be appearing, in various forums and anthologies, including Barrow Street, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Grabbing the Apple: An Anthology of New York Women Poets. You can hear her talk on an episode of Life Lines: The Books Podcast. Her debut collection of poetry and subsequently-released chapbook, brightly titled In My Absence and Next to Nothing, have been released from Winter Goose Publishing since 2016. Stella enjoys writing about ambivalence, attraction, and general emotional discomfort.

Bakar Wilson has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Colgate Writers’ Conference. He has performed his work at the Bowery Poetry Club, The Poetry Project, The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Asian-American Writer's Workshop, and the Langston Hughes House, among others. His poetry has appeared in The Vanderbilt Review, The Lumberyard Radio Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Flicker and Spark: A Contemporary Queer Anthology, The Ostrich Review, and kenyonreview.org, among others.  A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Bakar received his B.A. in English from Vanderbilt University and his M.A. in Creative Writing from The City College of New York. He is an Adjunct Lecturer of English and Creative Writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College at CUNY.

/@bakarw on instagram.