Poetry Electric: Women’s Poetry Happening

Ilka Scobie

Native New Yorker Ilka Scobie teaches poetry in the public school system. She writes about contemporary art for London’s Artlyst. Recent poems have appeared in Vanitas, here/there, Poetry in Performance, and LiveMag. She has read at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Bronx Museum, the Hole Gallery, and the Soncino Arts Biennial, Italy.

Jane LeCroy

Poet, performance artist, home-birthing mother of 3, teacher, atheist, vegetarian, hedonist, fronts the avant-pop band The Icebergs with Tom Abbs and David Rogers-Berry.  She has toured as part of Sister Spit the west coast women’s poetry troupe and Nu Voices, Kid Lucky’s hip-hop a capella orchestra.  “Signature Play” her multimedia book from Three Rooms Press 2013, http://threeroomspress.com/authors/jane-lecroy/ features her lyric poems, musical scores, visual art, and access to audio files and a pushcart nomination.  Jane is a teaching artist in NYC public schools. Check out her many books and recordings at www.janelecroy.com and request to be put on her list to receive free poems hot off her brain with every show invite, find her by name on social media.

Olena Jennings

Olena Jennings has published poetry in Poems by Sunday.  Her translations of poetry can be found in Chelsea, Poetry International, and Wolf.  She has read her poetry with Yara Arts Group, at the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and at the Ukrainian Museum.  She has published fiction in Fawlt, Joyland, and Projecttile. She completed her MFA in writing at Columbia and her MA in Ukrainian Literature at the University of Alberta.

Eve Crusto

Eve Crusto is a playwright, screenwriter, and poet. Her plays have been performed at Theatre for the New City, Theatre Row, The Producer’s Club, Littlefield Theatre in Brooklyn, the PAC House Theatre in New Rochelle, New Orleans, Aspen, Amherst, and South Hadley, Massachusetts. Her screenplays have been honored at the Chicago Int’l Film Festival, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Int’l Film Festival, and NYU’s Fusion Film Festival. She is a Sloan Foundation Screenwriting Competition finalist, a recipient of the National MFA Playwright’s Award from Theatre Masters, an alumna of Teach For America, and founder of the Fifth Ward Five Ways Performing Arts Club in New Orleans, where she is from. Eve received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and her M.F.A. from Tisch School of the Arts. Eve currently works as a script assistant at NickJr’s literacy show Wallykazam! and is a member of Sister Scribes.

Wanda Phipps

Wanda Phipps is a writer/performer living in Brooklyn. Her books include Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems. Her poetry has been 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 Time Out New York, Paper Magazine, and About.com.

Naomi Extra

Naomi Extra is a Haitian-American poet and essayist from upstate New York. She is also a Cave Canem Fellow and regular contributor for the online magazine, Weird Sister. Her writings have appeared in The Feminist Wire, Racialicious, Bitch Magazine, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. Currently, she is pursuing a doctoral degree in American Studies at Rutgers University where her work centers on black female sex-positivity in the 1960s and 70s.

Kelli Stevens Kane

Kelli Stevens Kane is a Cave Canem Fellow, an August Wilson Center Fellow, and a Flight School Fellow, and has twice received Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grants from The Pittsburgh Foundation. She reads her poetry and oral history, and performs her one-woman show, BIG GEORGE, nationally. For more info visit www.kellistevenskane.com and kskpoet.wordpress.com.

Kate Hess

Kate Hess (Indigo Moon) is a spoken word artist/vocalist/dancer/photographer, who started performing in the poetry clubs in NYC in 2008. Her first poem was published at the age of 11. Kate grew up studying classical piano for six years along with dance, and extensive vocal training and acting later on. In 2008, she sang background vocals for reggae and African bands such as, International Generation, and Sekouba & The Bolomba Band (2011). She got accepted to the BFA Musical Theatre program at Emerson College in 2003 and continued to study theatre/media arts instead.  Her passion for electronic music led her to dj for Emerson College’s radio station, Revolutions (WERS) in 2003-2005. In 2005 she attended the experimental theatre program, Trinity/La Mama E.T.C. Kate started her band/collective, Moon Frequentzy, in 2013, with the help of guitarist, Gabriel Gordon (Natalie Merchant), backing her up. She is working on her EP with a tribal/hip hop beatmaker/producer named Srikalogy. Kate choreographs original pieces under the company name, Earth Vibration Dancers, founded in the spring of 2014.  Her mission is to integrate the mediums of poetry, choreography, and music, into experiential soundscape performances igniting all the senses; and to help empower others, especially the underserved, through the use of voice and movement.  Her work is a birthing process of her life experience for cathartic transformation of herself and others.  http://indigomoonfrequentzy.tumblr.com/ http://earthvibrationdancers.tumblr.com/ https://soundcloud.com/indigomoonfrequentzy katehess7@gmail.com

H.D. Artemis

Considers herself a relational artist and primarily explores the intersection of experiences between subject and object, the mystical and the mundane, and people, places and things. She uses various forms in order to provide an outlet for her creative expression including creating images in stained glass, folding origami, writing and producing events that bring people together for meaningful reasons.  Her poetry has appeared in various anthologies and online. She lives in Exotic Brooklyn.

Rio Cortez

Rio Cortez is a Pushcart-nominated poet, who has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Canto Mundo Foundations. She was a recipient of the Sarah Lawrence College Lucy Grealy Prize in Poetry and the 2012 Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is a graduate of the MFA program at New York University and co-founder of the Good Times Collective. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including Prairie Schooner, Sugar House Review, and Chorus: A Literary Mixtape. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, she daylights as a book analyst at Penguin Random House. Rio lives in Queens, NY. http://www.riocortez.com

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