PEM - Groups Hub

“Ultimately the poem is about the moment at which mere sequence turns consequential; where moments suddenly cohere into the momentous.” —Heather McHugh

Brenda Hillman once said, “Each piece [of a sequence of poems] should be an isolated gem”— A gem that is shaped by the pressure placed on it by the rest of the poems in a sequence. Through repetitions of structure, image and theme, the elongated form of the sequence poem can both suggest and disrupt narrative and create a space where one can explore a topic from multiple directions, styles and voices. What is the urgency of the sequence? What are the cumulative meanings, iterative meanings, and afterlives of a poem read within a sequence? In what ways does a sequence of poems allow us to become emotional historians of the present?

Sara Deniz Akant, Anna V.Q. Ross, Diannely Antigua, Ashna Ali, and Adrienne Raphel all work in this poetic form. In this panel, each poet will share work from recent projects and share the ways in which writing in sequence enlarges and informs their poetic practice. We will end with a Q&A discussion.

PEM - Morse Auditorium

Come join us for our first headline event of the Festival, featuring Diannely Antigua and Felicia Zamora, sponsored by fellow Poetry Coalition organization Letras Latinas.

Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), strives to enhance the visibility, appreciation and study of Latinx literature both on and off the campus of the University of Notre Dame. We put an emphasis on programs that support newer voices, foster a sense of community among writers, and place Latinx writers in community spaces.

The Boston Poetry Slam holds a weekly show every Wednesday downstairs at the Cantab Lounge. This is the flagship show of the Boston Poetry Slam and the entire night is devoted to the craft, performance, and enjoyment of poetry.

The cover charge is $4, cash or credit. No tickets are sold in advance. The poetry show is 21+, with a photo ID and Vaccination Card required to enter the venue. Doors open at approximately 7:15 for an 8:00 poetry-only open mic. Feature starts after the 9:45 break.

Join us for a night of poetry! At MassArt On April 29th, at 6:30 pm, at Kennedy 208, Diannely Antigua and Kevin McLellan will share their work at the "Poetry & Beyond" event. Don't miss the opportunity to hear these two talented poets speak.

Join us for a full day of readings, workshops, multi-genre performances, a small press fair, and more. Free and open to all! Register here for the festival!

Reading and Q&A with local poets for National Poetry Month!

Library of America hosts Luz y Carbón, an AWP off-site reading featuring Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Brandon Som (winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry), Christopher Soto, Diannely Antigua, and Francisco Márquez in honor of Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology.

Register here!

Location: Room 518, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

Are poems ever finished, or just abandoned? In this panel, five poets will explore the process of a single published poem, from initial inspiration and drafting, through the process of revision, and focus on the moment they decided their work was finished—if it ever was. Focusing on works that experienced deep and significant changes throughout their writing, this panel will explore the way revision can reveal hidden rooms within an initial draft, and examine the moments those revisions end.

Speakers: Megan Pinto, James Fujinami Moore, Diannely Antigua, Taneum Bambrick, Michael Dhyne

Location: Carl Hansen Student Center SC 120

The Latinx, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Northeastern University invites you to join a book talk and poetry reading featuring Sandra Guzmán, Diannely Antigua, María Clara Sharupi Jua, and Yvette Modestin and their compelling book, Daughters of Latin America.  The event will take place on Thursday, March 13th, 4:00-6:00PM, at Northeastern’s Alumni Center, 6th Floor, 716 Columbus Avenue, Boston. This is a FREE event! Register HERE!

FIESTA DE POETAS: A CELEBRATION OF LATINO POETRY

Room 2106 (Building 2, 1st Floor)

Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology edited by poet and critic RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ gathers more than 180 poets in Spanish and English spanning from the 17th century to the present. These poems bear witness to the beauty and power of this vibrant and expanding tradition: its profound engagement with pasts both mythical and historical, its reckoning with the complexities of language, land, and identity, and its vision of a nation enriched by the stories of immigrants, exiles, refugees, and their descendants.

Join us for an evening of poetry celebrating the richest, most revelatory collection of 21st-century Latino poetry ever published, followed by a dance party. Featuring DIANNELY ANTIGUA, RICHARD BLANCO, SANDRA M. CASTILLO, ADRIAN CASTRO, ARIEL FRANCISCO, RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ, FARID MATUK, PABLO MEDINA, DEBORAH PAREDEZ, GABRIEL RAMIREZ, and ALEXANDRA LYTTON REGALADO. Introduction by CARIDAD MORO-GRONLIER, poet laureate for Miami-Dade County; moderated by MAX RUDIN, president and publisher of Library of America.

THREE POETS LAUREATE IN CONVERSATION

Room 8303 (Building 8, 3rd Floor)

Join us for a poetry reading and conversation on the role of the localized poet laureate in service to the community. DIANNELY ANTIGUA (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) grapples with the body as a site of pain and trauma in Good Monster, chronicling her reckoning with shame, her fallout with faith, and the desire to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body. Love Prodigal by TRACI BRIMHALL (Kansas) lives in the dishevelment of starting over from a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family, and chronic illness, reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. CARIDAD MORO-GRONLIER (Miami-Dade County) plunges readers into Cuban American life on-the-hyphen in Tortillera, considering the role of language on gender, sexuality, diaspora, and shame. Moderated by NICOLE TALLMAN, poetry ambassador for Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

“CARIBBEAN NARRATIVES: HISTORY, HEROES & HEALING” – PANEL

Room 8302 (Building 8, 3rd Floor)

DIANNELY ANTIGUA’s Good Monster presents a raw and innovative poetry collection that navigates themes of trauma, chronic pain, and mental illness. MERLE COLLINS’ Ocean Stirrings: A Work of Fiction in Tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Working Mother and Activist, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings offers a poetic exploration of Little’s life, intertwining historical narrative with the power of imagination to illuminate a figure often overshadowed by her famous son. GEOFFREY PHILP’s graphic novel My Name is Marcus introduces readers to Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican icon who ignited a global movement for social justice. Together, these works offer profound insights into the history, heroes, and healing that define the Caribbean experience. Moderated by poet, blogger, and radio host SHARON CORINTHIAN.

Poetry Reading Featuring Diannely Antigua -  November 12, Durham, NH

Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence, Diannely Antigua will read her poem, "Golden Shovel with Solstice" which is included in the Latino Poetry anthology and share some of her other work with us as well. We will also read poems from the anthology focusing on the themes of Voice and Resistance, Family and Community, and Language. Our readers will include Daniel Chávez Landeros and Lucía Montás (both from UNH) and Mary Russell (Center for the Book). This event, which is free and open to the public, will be held on Tuesday November 12, 2024, 5-7pm at Durham Public Library.

Latino Poetry: Places We Call Home is a major public humanities initiative, planned for 2024–25, that celebrates and explores the multifaceted legacy of Latino poetry. It is directed by Library of America and funded with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Lugares que llamamos hogar es una gran iniciativa pública en el campo de las humanidades, que se proyecta para el 2024 – 2025. Es dirigida por Library of América con el generoso apoyo del Fondo Nacional para las Humanidades.

Whiting Award–winning poet Diannely Antigua (Good Monster) and National Book Award finalist Danez Smith (Bluff) are joined by Oregon Public Broadcasting host and producer Jenn Chávez to reflect on the role despair and violence, hope and resilience play in their latest poetry collections.

About Good Monster:

With an equal dose of fatalism and dark wit, Antigua captures the body’s capacity to cage and cradle sadness.

Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster grapples with the body as a site of chronic pain and trauma. Poignant and guttural, the collection “voyage[s] the land between crisis and hope,” chronicling Antigua’s reckoning with shame and her fallout with faith. As poems cage and cradle devastating truths–a stepfather’s abusive touch, a mother’s “soft harm”–the speaker’s anxiety, depression, and boundless need become monstrous shadows. Here, poems dance on bars, speak in tongues, and cry in psych wards. When “God [becomes] a house [she] can’t leave,” language becomes the only currency left. We see the messiness of survival unfold through sestinas, a series of Sad Girl sonnets, and diary entries–an invented collage form using Antigua’s personal journals. At the crux of despair, Antigua locates a resilient desire to find a love that will remain, to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body and, above all, to keep on living.

About Bluff:

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America’s acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem–part map, part annotation, part visual argument–offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love–those given and made–are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Join poets Amanda Hawkins and Diannely Antigua at UpUp Books where they’ll read from their collections and discuss how poetry “cage[s] and cradle[s]” visceral truths. Hawkins’s forthcoming collection, When I Say the Bones I Mean the Bones(Wandering Aengus, 2025), “burns through themes of living, dying, of the spiritual, how human beings fit onto and into the earth.” Antigua’s Good Monster (Copper Canyon, 2024) “reckons with shame and her fallout with faith.” Both poets embrace darkness and ambiguity in their pursuit of spaces – bodily and otherwise – worthy of being called home.

Living Writers Poetry Series Presents: Diannely Antigua

Thursday, October 24, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
Diannely Antigua Reading From Her Poetry

Click here to stream.

Living Writers Poetry Series Presents: Diannely Antigua

Wednesday, October 23, 6:00 PM ET
Rose O'Neill Literary House
So You Want to Make a Podcast? With Diannely Antigua.

Click here to stream.

Wednesday, October 9

6:00 PM A SHOWCASE OF BLACK POET LAUREATES

PORTLAND - SPACE Gallery

Five Black poets from all over the U.S. who have held or currently hold the title of Poet Laureate in their city will read their original work and engage in a panel discussion moderated by former poet laureate of Portland, Maine Maya Williams. Featuring A$iahMae (Charleston, South Carolina), Andrea Vocab Sanderson (San Antonio, Texas), Diannely Antigua (Portsmouth, New Hampshire), Junious "Jay" Ward (Charlotte, North Carolina), and Melissa Ferrer-Civil (Kansas City, Missouri).

More Info HERE!

1-2:30pm [Hybrid] — Poets of the Public: New England Poet Laureates
Poets will share about their role as Poet Laureate in their respective communities, sharing information about the programming we each developed, and will discuss what it means to be a “Civic Poet” with a broad set of responsibilities and audiences while also maintaining one’s own personal writing practice. Featuring Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua.

Register HERE!

7-8:30pm [Hybrid] — Open Mic Night with Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua

Bring your poems to Emily Dickinson’s garden! Readers will have 5 minutes each to make us feel “physically as if the top of [our] head[s] were taken off!” (Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 16 August 1870) Featured poets Oliver de la Paz and Diannelly Antigua will follow the open mic. Open mic sign-ups will be handled in advance via a Google Form and a lottery, and selected readers will be notified. Stay tuned for the Google form, which will be posted here.

Register HERE!

Join us for our next Brooklyn Poets Reading Series event at 144 Montague on Friday, September 20, featuring poets Megan Pinto, Diannely Antigua and Hala Alyan! Free and open to the public, the event will also be livestreamed via Zoom. Wine reception for in-person attendees will begin at 6 PM and readings will begin at 7. Book signing to follow.

Get tickets HERE!

Join us for a celebration of Food, Art, Culture, and Community.

WHEN:
Sunday, August 18th, 2024

WHERE:
Strawbery Banke Museum
Portsmouth, NH

Join us on Tuesday, July 23 when we welcome poets Eugenia Leigh & Diannely Antigua to The Notebooks Collective for an evening of conversation about creativity and connection. We are thrilled to host this In Conversation, in which the poets will discuss their newest books, Bianca and Good Monster respectively, among other things.

This is a virtual event. RSVP here to receive the zoom link to join.

Join us for an evening with Diannely Antigua and Ani Gjika.

Free and open to all. Donations are appreciated to support the GWC’s work in the community.

Register HERE!

Join the Cambridge Public Library in celebrating Caribbean American Heritage Month with a poetry reading and conversation featuring two award-winning local poets with roots in the Caribbean, DIANNELY ANTIGUA and PATRICK SYLVAIN.

Each poet will read poems for about twenty minutes, to be followed by a wide-ranging conversation and audience Q&A.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two books of poetry, including Good Monster, published just last month by Copper Canyon Press. She is the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH.

Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American poet, writer, social and literary critic, and photographer who has published widely on Haiti and Haitian diaspora culture, politics, language, and religion. He is the author of several poetry books in English and Haitian, and his poems have been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Simmons 

This reading and talk will be hybrid (via Zoom). It is co-sponsored by the Cambridge Public Library Foundation.

Date: Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Time: 6:00pm - 7:30pm

Location: Lecture Hall, Main Library

Registration is required. There are 150 in-person seats available. There are 150 online seats available.

In person at Brookline Booksmith! Join us for an evening of poetry with Amy M. Alvarez, Octavio González, Anthony DiPietro, & Diannely Antigua.

This event is part of Third Thursdays Poetry, a monthly reading series at Brookline Booksmith.

Register for the event!

RSVP to let us know you're coming! Depending on the volume of responses, an RSVP may be required for entrance to the event. You will also be alerted to important details about the program, including safety requirements, cancellations, and book signing updates.

Livestream!

Barring technical difficulty, this event will be livestreamed on our store YouTube channel.