Featuring Gbenga Adesina and Richard Jeffrey Newman

Hosted by David Lawton

Plus open mic

21+

$3 suggested donation. Two drink min, alcoholic or non.

Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian born poet and essayist who currently lives in Brooklyn. He jointly won the 2016 Brunel University, UK Poetry Prize. His poem, “How To Paint A Girl” was selected by Mathew Zapruder for its “clarity of observation and empathetic insight into the suffering of another” for publication in the New York Times. He was a 2016 Norman Mailer Poetry Fellow at Pepperdine University, Malibu, California. He has received scholarships and residencies from Fine Arts Work Centre, Provincetown, the Open Society Foundation in Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal, the Callaloo Fellowship workshop at Oxford and most recently completed an Emerging Poets Fellowship at Poets House, New York. His poetry chapbook, Painter of Water, was published by Akashic Books, New York in a series edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Brittle Paper, Vinyl, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He is currently enrolled in the MFA program at NYU as a Starworks Fellow where he also teaches undergraduate poetry.  

As a poet and essayist, Richard Jeffrey Newman’s work explores the impact of feminism on his life as a man. As a co-translator of classical Persian poetry, he writes about the impact of that canon on our contemporary lives. He has published two books of poetry, Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions 2017) and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006). He has also published a chapbook of poetry, For My Son, A Kind of Prayer (Ghostbird Press 2016), as well as three books of translation from classical Persian poetry, most recently The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Junction Press 2011). Newman is on the executive board of Newtown Literary, a Queens, NY-based literary non-profit and curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, NY. He is Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY, where he also serves as secretary of his faculty union, The Nassau Community College Federation of Teachers (NCCFT). His website is www.richardjnewman.com.