Celebrate the debut collections of poets Sasha Debevec-McKenney and Oluwaseun Olayiwola in a reading and craft conversation moderated by Emma Gomis.
Debevec-McKenney’s Joy Is My Middle Name captures the messy, intimate journey from one decade of life to the next, while Olayiwola’s Strange Beach reimagines the body and the self as shifting landscapes of desire, memory, and change. Together, their work invites audiences to consider how poetry can reshape how we move through the world.
About the speakers:
Sasha Debevec-McKenney‘s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review. She was the 2020-2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer. He has been published by the Guardian, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Oxford Poetry, the Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement. His choreographic work has been presented at the V&A, The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire. Seun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He lectures in dance at the Kingston School of Art.
Emma Gomis is a Catalan American writer and researcher. Her book, Recupera, was published by the87Press in February. She has published four pamphlets of poetry, two of which were cowritten with Anne Waldman. She is a coeditor of New Weathers (Nightboat Books) and Manifold, a journal of experimental criticism. In 2020, she was selected by Patricia Spears as The Poetry Project’s Brannan Prize winner. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in contemporary feminist art writing.
