PSNY Salon Series: Kyle Carrero Lopez's PARTY LINE

The Poetry Society of New York's Salon Series aims to create a sanctuary where writers and literature lovers can meet, mingle, think, feel, indulge, discuss, listen, learn, and live life to its fullest! Each Salon serves as a celebration of an esteemed poet's new release, consisting of a 20-30 minute reading followed by a Q&A and a book signing. Admission is pay what you can. Previous Salons have celebrated the launch of Jericho Brown's The Tradition, Ariana Reines' A Sand Book, and Dorothea Lasky's The Shining. Readings begin at 7:30pm. Cocktail attire is encouraged but not required. This event's featured reader is Kyle Carrero Lopez, & advance copies of PARTY LINE will be available for purchase at the Salon courtesy of Graywolf Press & Taylor & Co Books.

Members of The Poetry Society of New York & The Urbane Arts Club are invited to join us for an exclusive cocktail party from 6:30-7pm before the event.

Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of , the chapbook winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest (sample poems here), , forthcoming July 2026 from Graywolf, and serves as Editor for the . Born to Cuban parents in northern New Jersey, his work centers power, social life, and Afro-Cuban histories, among other subjects. He’s represented by—but not related to—Ashley Lopez at Massie McQuilkin & Altman. He co-founded LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists. His writing has been highlighted in Best New Poets and Best of the Net; round-ups in W Magazine, Current Affairs, and The Atlantic; and episodes of and . Kyle has received fellowships from Cave Canem, CubaOne Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, NYC Poets Afloat, and NYU, where he was a Goldwater Writing Workshop Fellow, a Provost’s Global Research Initiative Fellow at NYU Berlin, and earned his M.F.A. in Poetry. He was also a 2022 Tin House Scholar.

Kyle Carrero Lopez’s electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they have othered.

The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals’ actions and those of the state. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination.

Alternating between humor and lyric severity, playfulness and political critique, these poems negotiate contradiction with linguistic dexterity and critical consciousness, proving that political poetry can be both serious and joyously alive.

The Urbane Arts Club is a thriving community of creatives in historic Ditmas Park. We are an events venue and coworking space, set in a Victorian home and former 1920s Speakeasy, as well as a home for musical performances, immersive theater, visual arts, literary readings, and more! Become a member of Brooklyn’s best kept secret, The Urbane Arts Club.

Join us for a phone-free deep reading session with Leonard Nalencz and The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life exploring Party Line alongside poems in conversation with it, dwelling with language slowly enough to be shaped by its language and rhythms. Through silence, close attention, and open discussion, we'll discover what these poems have to say to one another and to us.

About the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life: The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life is a nonprofit offering tuition-free, phone-free programs where participants gather for deep reading, serious conversation, and communal learning. Our immersive programs, held on a quiet farm in Catskill, NY, address urgent cultural challenges: polarization, loneliness, digital distraction, and the erosion of the humanities. Like the Poetry Society of New York, the Matthew Strother Center is a refuge from the distractions of technological modernity. We gather in person, away from screens and metrics, to engage with great texts, ask enduring questions, and channel ideas into various forms of creative practice. Here, there are no grades, no credentials, no distractions — only the joyful, demanding work of thinking carefully, reflecting creatively, speaking honestly, and rediscovering what it means to live a good life.
About the instructor: Leonard Nalencz teaches literature at the University of Mount Saint Vincent and with the Bard Pr*son Initiative. He has written about epic and lyric poetry in English and Italian, and collaborated on a translation into English and Spanish of stories and poems in Quechua.

Info: Optional phone-free deep reading session with Leonard Nalencz and The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life exploring Party Line alongside poems in conversation with it, dwelling with language slowly enough to be shaped by its language and rhythms. Through silence, close attention, and open discussion, we'll discover what these poems have to say to one another and to us.

Info: Featuring typewriter poetry & interactive poetry installations!

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