Poetry Electric: Fighting to Stay Cool - An All Star Revue

Wanda Phipps is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her books include Mind Honey (Autonomedia), Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire (BlazeVOX [books]), and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems (Soft Skull Press). Her poetry has been published over a hundred times and translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician and Bangla. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Theater Translation Fund, and others. As a founding member of Yara Arts Group she has collaborated on numerous theatrical productions presented in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Siberia, and at La MaMa, E.T.C. in NYC. She's curated reading series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church and written about the arts for Boog City, Time Out New York, Paper Magazine, and others.

‍MAPUTI. Shona mbira music of Zimbabwe is one of the most soulful sounds on the African continent. Originally used in all-night spirit possession ceremonies, the iron-pronged mbira produces music beautiful enough to attract the spirits and rhythmically charged enough to keep people dancing throughout the night. MAPUTI plays traditional songs that have been handed down to us by master musicians of Zimbabwe. With Nora Balaban.

‍John Coletti is the author of Peppermint Oil (PUSH, 2020), Deep Code (City Lights, 2014), Mum Halo (Rust Buckle Books, 2010), Same Enemy Rainbow (fewer & further 2008), and Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs 2005). With Anselm Berrigan, he is the author of Skasers (Flowers & Cream, 2012). His new book Attachment Simply will be released by Eternal Sections in September 2023.

Originally from Hawaii, Charles Yuen has lived in New York City since 1981. Notable awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Yuen’s art demonstrates an interest in art’s potential as social critique and personal fulfillment. Part catharsis and part poetics, he has been investigating fluid definitions of realism and rationality, advocating for a subjective logic for humanist expression.‍

Leah Elimeliah originally from Moscow, is a poet and writer based in New York. An Adjunct Assistant Professor at The City College of New York and John Jay College, Leah is also the founder and director of WordShedNYC Reading Series and has collaborated on various poetry/visual/dance projects with independent artists, experimenting with cross genres, multimedia and poetry. She is currently crafting her debut poetry collection, working on an art project "Notes from Daughters" and a one woman show. Her writing delves into themes of identity, language, immigration, intergenerational trauma, sexuality and culture.

Rifka Milder received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts and lives and works in her native city, New York. Her current abstract work takes inspiration from natural and architectural forms remembered from trips to Latin America and elsewhere. She exhibits nationally and internationally, including, most recently, a one-person show at The Yard in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2023). Also on exhibit at the Palo Gallery in 2023 is a weaving of Pressure and Streams she had made in San Antonio Aguas Caliente, Guatemala. Milder returned to Guatemala in the summer of ’23, to work with the master weaver Maria Catalina Hernandez to capture the painting's colors and composition in fiber. She wove it on a backstrap loom.