Gathering Fire: Pride Poetry Readings and Workshops

The 2022 Biennial includes an installation representing the work of A Gathering of the Tribes (AGOTT), a nonprofit arts organization founded in 1991 by writer and professor Steve Cannon (1935–2019). Cannon crafted a space for artists and writers to gather and create community. AGOTT hosts pop up literary events and provides resources for diverse artists and writers in addition to publishing poetry, prose, and visual art in their biennial print journal, Tribes Magazine, and via A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine Online. On Saturday, June 11th, AGOTT joins forces with Capturing Fire (a nonprofit promoting trans and queer artists of the poetry slam) to present a Pride Poetry Reading featuring Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Zefyr Lisowski, Amy King, Micah the Poet, and Regie Cabico, and hosted by AGOTT’s E.D. Chavisa Woods.

Gathering Fire: Intergenerational Poetry Workshop (What I Want To Be and Who I Am Becoming: A Queer Friendly Poetry Workshop for Families)
Provided by A Gathering of the Tribes and Capturing Fire
Led by Regie Cabico
12:15 pm, 2:15 pm

For families with kids of all ages

We will brainstorm imagery through improvisation and movement gestures, channeling our powerful selves with our voices and words. If you were a vehicle, what would you be? If you were a musical instrument, what would you be? By combining adjectives and concrete nouns, young students will develop their poetry powers from the page to the stage. The workshop will conclude with participants performing the poems they create.

Regie Cabico is a pioneer of spoken word having won the 1993 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam, later taking 3 National Prizes. Cabico is an inaugural 2019 playwriting fellow for Le Maison Baldwin Writer Residency. Television credits include 2 seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR’s Snap Judgment, and others. He is a recipient of a 2008 Future Aesthetics Arts Award Regrant from The Ford Foundation/Hip Hop Theater Festival, three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships for Poetry and Multidisciplinary Performance, and others. Cabico received The Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers for his decade-long work teaching at-risk youth at Bellevue Hospital. He is a spoken word and playwriting teaching artist at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and is a former Artist In Residence at NYU's Asian Pacific American Studies Program. Cabico is the director of Capfire Spoken Word Arts & Press.

Gathering Fire: Poetry Reading
Hosted by Chavisa Woods
11 am, 1:15 pm

For kids and grownups of all ages

A Gathering of the Tribes and Capturing Fire are proud to present the second annual Gathering Fire. This queer lit event celebrates our diverse LGBTQ community of poets and writers, and our rich history of creating avant-garde, revolutionary works in collaboration and with support from our allies. Gathering Fire features live readings from five renowned LGBTQ poets.

Chavisa Woods is a MacDowell Fellow and the author of four books, including Things To Do When You're Goth in the Country, and 100 Times, (A Memoir of Sexism), both from Seven Stories Press. Woods was the recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award, the Kathy Acker Award in Writing, and Cobalt‘s Zora Neale Hurston Prize for Fiction. Her work has received praise from The New York Times, The LA Times, Publisher’s Weekly, The Stranger, The Seattle Review of Books, Booklist, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, and many other media outlets. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the nonprofit art and literary organization, A Gathering of the Tribes, which was founded by her mentor, Steve Cannon, in 1991. Her literary work primarily focuses on the lives of those living in conservative, rural America, and issues dealings with class, queerness and feminism. She has appeared on The Young Turks, NPR’s 1A, and her work has appeared in such publications as Tin House, LitHub, Electric Lit, Full Stop, The Brooklyn Rail, The Evergreen Review, New York Quarterly, and many others.

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet, author, and curator. Winner of the 2022 Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry for her verse memoir, Mama Phife Represents, which stands as a tribute to her late son, hip hop icon Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest. Alongside Mama Phife Represents, her five collections of poetry, Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, Convincing the Body, and Arrival, a finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Award, present a lifetime dedicated to the written word. Cheryl’s latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets, was published by Northwestern University Press in February 2022. 

Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize winner. She’s co-editor of the anthology Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change and the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry. King is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.

Micah the Poet is a writer, orator, poet, DJ, and community activist. Though a native of the DC area, he has traveled extensively with his work with the arts, outreach, and community building. He is the author of Things No One Else Wants to Say. Micah works with artists, politicians, religious and government organizations along with the community to create spaces that empower the everyday person. 

Zefyr Lisowski grew up in the Great Dismal Swamp at the border of North Carolina and Virginia and currently resides in New York City. She’s a poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal and the author of the Lizzie Borden queer murder chapbook Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press 2019). Her work has appeared in Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, and many other places. She lives at zeflisowski.com.

For related road closure information, please see our full listing of Whitney Pride! events.