Book Launch Reading: Adedayo Agarau's The Years of Blood

Join these five talented poets (Adedayo Agarau, Funto Omojola, Miguel Martin Perez, Mya Matteo Alexice, and Shayla Lawz) as they read their own work in celebration and conversation with Adedayo Agarau's debut book of poetryThe Years of Blood.

More about the authors:

Adedayo Agarau is the author of “The Years of Blood,” winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, Fall 2025). He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ‘25, a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus.

Funto is the author of If I Gather Here and Shout (2024), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and their writing has appeared in The Offing, The Baffler, American Poets, Boston Review, Ghost Proposal, and elsewhere. Omojola has received fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem Foundation, Millay Arts, The Poetry Project, and has presented work at Gladstone Gallery, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, NY; Silver Eye Center for Photography, PA; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, among others. They hold an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

Mya Matteo Alexice is a Black and white graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA. A Cave Canem fellow and academic studying Black romantic life, they are the author of A Shape We’ve Yet to Name (2024) and The Limerence Object (2025). Matteo’s poems can be found in publications such as Pleiades, swamp pink, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, diode, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Bennington Review, Honey Literary and elsewhere. They’ve received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, and more. They were the runner-up in the 2023 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest judged by Gary Soto. He enjoys video games where you can make the characters kiss.

Miguel Martin Perez (he/they) is a queer Afro-Dominican poet raised in Harlem and the South Bronx. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, a 2022 Langston Hughes Fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and an alum of the Tin House Winter Workshop. His work has received the Leslie McGrath Poetry Prize in 2023, the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize in 2021, and was named a finalist for Narrative's 16th Annual Poetry Contest in 2024 as well as the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize in 2022. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Raleigh Review, Acentos Review, and Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly among others. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California – Riverside and currently resides in the Bronx.

Shayla Lawz is a fiction writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ, working at the intersection of text, sound, and performance. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden, and The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) where she was the 2024 Dream Space Resident. She has served as the inaugural writer-in-residence at The Hurston/Wright Foundation and has been a visiting writer at The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Rutgers University, and Brown University where she received her MFA in fiction. Her writing and sound work appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Poetry Foundation, Catapult, and Obsidian, among others. Her debut poetry collection speculation, n. (2021) was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize and has been featured in Poets & Writers, The Slowdown, and NPR’s On the Record. She lives in Brooklyn where she is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.

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