Poetics of Liberation: A Reading and Community Gathering

Poetics of Liberation is an intersectional feminist reading and community gathering celebrating radical and queer writers whose work inspires social transformation. Hosted at Le Mondo—an artist-owned theater for experimental performing arts and radical community collaboration in the heart of Baltimore—we are thrilled to feature dezireé a. brown, Ashley-Devon, María Esquinca, Chiagoziem Jideofor, Katelin Kelly, Jae Nichelle, Susan Nguyen, jj peña, m. mick powell, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, and Tyehimba Jess.

Hosted by Host Publications editors Annar Veröld-Miranda & Claire Bowman!

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✦ Free & open to all lovers of literature.

✦ This reading will feature literary-themed handcrafted mocktails.

✦ Health and safety note: masks are encouraged and will be provided.

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Host Publications is an award-winning, women-led independent publisher located in Austin, Texas. Devoted to our mission to elevate historically marginalized writers, Host Publications publishes radical poetry and fiction by emerging LGBTQ+, BIPOC, intersectional feminist, and immigrant voices.

Info: heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), Ephemeral (Ecotheo Collective, 2024), Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2025), Wayward Creatures (Host Publications, 2025), and Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming in 2026).

Info: María Esquinca is a Xicana poet, educator and journalist. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and grew up in El Paso, TX. Her debut collection “Where Heaven Sinks” was the winner of the 2024 Andrés Montoya Prize, and was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera. She currently teaches English language learners in San Francisco.

Info: Chiagoziem Jideofor is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s ADDA, the Minnesota review, Sho Poetry Journal, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Info: Katelin Kelly is a poet and educator originally from Lexington, KY. She teaches creative writing and English in central Texas in addition to serving as creative writing chair for the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. Her poetry collection, TUCK, was named as a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series.

Info: Ashley-Devon is a multi-modal storyteller working primarily with ethnography, poetry, and collage as tools for cultural empowerment and preservation. They authored a poetic memoir, Meet Me Where the Water Runs into Itself Once Again. You may find their other poems and culture writing in the African-American Review, The Rumpus, The Infrarrealista Review, Ginger Magazine, Dinner Bell Magazine, and beyond.

Info: m. mick powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, educator, Aries, and the author of DEAD GIRL CAMEO, named a Best Book of 2025 by the New York Public Library and Debutiful. A proud member of Host's Board of Directors, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.

Info: Perfect time for a mocktail, buy from the featured writers booksale, mingle in the theater, make a new writing bestie!

Info: Susan Nguyen’s debut poetry collection Dear Diaspora won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She is the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a member of the She Who Has No Master(s) collective.

Info: jj peña is a queer, burrito loving writer based in las vegas. jj's currently working on their never ending manuscript.

Info: Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle (she/her) is the author of God Themselves (Andrews McMeel, 2023) and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary) (YesYes Books, 2019). A graduate fellow of The Watering Hole, Jae won the inaugural John Lewis Writing Award in poetry from the Georgia Writers Association and was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020, the Washington Square Review, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere.

Info: Dr. Dez Brown, publishing as dezireé a. brown, is a Black queer nonbinary Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, interdisciplinary scholar, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, MI. Their debut collection of poetry, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming, was published in 2025 by Host Publications and is winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize. Often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest, he spends much of his free time gaming and plays a mean hand of spades.

Info: Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

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