This event is co-presented by the Belladonna* Collaborative. Chaplets by the readers will be for sale for $5 each.

Janice A. Lowe

A multi-disciplinary composer, poet and pianist, Janice A. Lowe is the author of LEAVING CLE poems of nomadic dispersal and the chapbook SWAM. Her musical theater compositions include Lil Budda, text by Stephanie L. Jones, Sit-In at the Five & Dime, libretto by Marjorie Duffield and Millie and Christine McKoy Sisters’ Syncopated Sonnets in Song, text by Tyehimba Jess. Her multi-media work Desegregation Remix: 3 Women Sing the Borders is a collaboration with Lee Ann Brown. She teaches multi-media composition at Rutgers University, has taught in Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program and performs with her band NAMAROON. She has composed and recorded with several experimental bands including: w/o a net, Digital Diaspora and HAGL. She is a co-founder of the Dark Room Collective. Lowe was a recent Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania. She is a longtime music director at White Bird Productions’ Summer Musical Theater Program.

Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and emerging visual artist. She is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works and a chaplet, “Gift” by Belladonna. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, BOMB, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She has appeared in Art Forum, The Huffington Post and Hyperallergic. In 2017, she was a Visiting Critic at Yale and Columbia University. She is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts for 2017/18. She is online faculty at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC in the MFA summer low-res program for 3 consecutive years. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, NYU and Pratt Universities, Smack Mellon Gallery, The High Line, Performa, Danspace, The Bessies, Performance Space, Joe’s Pub, The Public Theater, SMFA, BRIC and was an artist- in- residence at Pratt University, Denniston Hill and Poet-Linc, Lincoln Center Education. She has toured internationally. She directed a final showcase at Lincoln Center Atrium. Her collage work appeared in Avram Finklestein’s FOUND at The Leslie Lohman Museum in 2017. She has created cover collage work for an upcoming Issue of Sinister Wisdom, (2018) Legacies of Resistance, “Dump Trump.” She has received a Monica Hand, July 2018 scholarship for the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni’s, “The 100 Best African American Poems.” Her short story book Sweet Dreams was published by Belladonna in April 2018. Visit http://www.belladonnaseries.org/sweet-dreams/