Poetry & Conversation with abdu mongo ali and Taylor Johnson

Join us for poetry and conversation with abdu mongo ali and Taylor Johnson.

About the Poets:

abdu mongo ali is a musician, poet, cross-disciplinary artist who works through sound, video, text, and performance. Ali has toured across continents, held performances, and exhibited work at many institutions such as MoMa PS1, Carnegie Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museum, and The Kennedy Center. They have been a resident with Red Bull Music and Pioneer Works, and a visiting artist at the Brown Arts Institute. They have also presented lectures and talks at Harvard University, Stanford University, and Towson University, and their writing has been supported by Bread Loaf. Their writing has been published in Pin Up Magazine, NiiJournal, Art Papers Magazine, and Little Patuxent Review. Ali was a recipient of the 2023 Mary Sawyers Baker Prize and is a 2023 USA Fellow. Ali holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.

Poet Taylor Johnson, the Pratt Library's 2025-25 Hackerman Writer in Residence, is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a 2024 Whiting Award. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He was the Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland, from 2022 to 2025.

About the Program:

• To attend in person please register here.
• A local bookseller will be on-site and will have Taylor Johnson's book available for purchase.
• Free parking vouchers are available to program attendees who park at the Franklin Street Garage (15 W. Franklin Street) after 4pm while supplies last. Ask Pratt event staff for your parking voucher prior to or after the program.
• This free event will be presented in-person and virtually.

Funding for this program has been provided through the generosity of The Hackerman Foundation.
Photo of Taylor Johnson by S*an D. Henry-Smith.

Host or Publisher Enoch Pratt Free Library