Staff Picks is a virtual-only quarterly reading series curated by the poets who assist with our space, web, events and office work. Each reading features a lineup of three poets nominated by different staff members as among the most essential new voices today. The series focuses on writers yet to publish a full-length collection of poetry, with an emphasis on Brooklyn-based poets and those from underrepresented communities. The event includes readings by our three featured poets and the poets they invite to open for them.
DeeSoul Carson (He/They) is a poet and educator from San Diego, CA. His work is featured or forthcoming in Voicemail Poems, Narrative, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Offing and elsewhere. A Stanford Univerity alum, DeeSoul has received fellowships from the Watering Hole and New York University, where he is an MFA candidate in the creative writing program.
Hera Naguib holds a doctorate in creative writing from Florida State University, focusing on global and transnational poetry. She is the winner of the 2023 John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award and the 2022 Quaterly West Poetry Prize. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, Wasafiri, World Literature Today and elsewhere.
Tariq Thompson is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of the chapbook LONE LILY (Sunset Press, 2021). His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Adroit, Sixth Finch, wildness, the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. Thompson was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and was awarded the 2020 Adroit Prize for Poetry. He is currently an MFA candidate at New York University.
Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani (she/her/hers) is a poet, public health practitioner, and teacher. She is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing (poetry) at New York University. She is interested in how we can use poetry and language to take care of one another.
Victoria Mbabazi’s work can be found in several literary magazines. Chapbook is available with Anstruther Press and FLIP is available with Knife Fork Book. Their full length collection The Siren In the Twelfth House is coming out in fall 2024 with Palimpsest Press. They’re currently Canadian in Brooklyn, New York.
Ayesha Raees عائشہ رئیس identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her work strongly revolves around issues of race and identity, G/god and displacement, and mental illness while possessing a strong agency for accessibility, community and change. She cultivates relationships between the word and the image through theatrical performance, filmic visual imagery, paint, and documentary photography. Raees currently serves as an assistant poetry editor at AAWW’s The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. Her debut chapbook Coining a Wishing Tower won the Broken River Prize, judged by Kaveh Akbar, and is published by Platypus Press. From Lahore, Pakistan, she currently shifts around Lahore, New York City and Miami.