Named one of the best reading series in NYC as well as one of the 50 best free things to do in the city by Time Out New York, the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series takes place six times a year at 144 Montague in Brooklyn Heights. Readings are free and open to the public and livestreamed via Zoom.
Each reading features three poets, with at least one from Brooklyn and one from outside the borough, pairing emerging with more established poets and focusing on those from underrepresented communities. Readings are curated by Jason Koo. For inquiries, contact us.
Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His collaborative chapbook Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood shares pages with Quenton Baker, Christina Sharpe and Torkwase Dyson. He has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and Poets House, and he has been featured on the Poetry podcast and Seattle’s the Stranger. His work has been translated into Ukrainian. He currently lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography.
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet and a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in poetry and poetry in translation. She is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and Best American Poetry 2021 and 2022. Her first collection The Pink Box, published by Willow Books, was longlisted for a PEN Open Book award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body, published by Four Way Books, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2023.
Kwame Dawes has authored 36 books of poetry, fiction, criticism and essays, including, most recently, Nebraska (UNP, 2019), Bivouac (Akashic Books, 2019) and City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern, 2017). Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press), cowritten with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared in 2016. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is also a faculty member in the Pacific MFA program. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.