Celebrating Spring around the world
Readings by Husnaa Hashim, Lyrispect, Mehrin (Mir) Masud-Elias, Sham-E-Ali Nayeem, and Raquel Salas Rivera
A time of natural rebirth, Spring is ripe with the energies of poetics. The season also marks a new year for cultures around the world: from Iran, to Bali, Sri Lanka, and more. Join Twelve Gates in welcoming Spring & the New Year through poetry. We're thrilled to present a stellar lineup of poets who know and love Philly in the Spring. A Q&A with the poets will follow the readings.
Husnaa Haajarah Hashim (they/she) is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, student herbalist, and undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the chapbook Honey Sequence (The Head & The Hand, 2018) published during her tenure as Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia (2017-2018).
Nina Elizabeth “Lyrispect” Ball (she/her) is an award-winning lyricist,activist, curator and educator whose creative and social justice work spans 20+ years. Her body of work is a marriage of multiple disciplines including film, music, poetry, live performance and media with a strong emphasis on writing and literacy. She is an activist and advocate for girls, women, people of color and marginalized communities.
Lyrispect believes that honest expression with layered execution can disrupt, heal, liberate and transform. What informs her practice is truth telling,complex human nature, cultural preservation, social justice, and unapologetic joy. She is the 2021 recipient of the "Shea Moisture" and "Good Mirrors Arent Cheap" Emerging Visionary Award.
Mehrin (Mir) Masud-Elias (she/her), who writes under the penname Mir Elias, is a poet, writer, lawyer and immigrant in the US from Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has published poems in collected editions and journals and written essays for a Leeway Foundation grant-funded food blog. Her first collection, Native Alien, submitted for poetry prizes, is an experimental memoir in prose poetry written during a nine-month period of pandemic-induced self-isolation in 2020.
She is the recipient of the 2021 Peregrine Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Contest judge Rachel Zolf describes her work as follows: “Mir’s poems ‘witness, record, survive’ in a remarkable range of forms on the page. Traumatic pasts burst into the present space of the poem ‘like cutouts punched through with the anonymous charity of bullets,’ reorienting the future and the reader’s consciousness at one and the same time.”
Author of the poetry collection, City of Pearls (UpSet Press 2019), Sham-e-Ali Nayeem (she/her) is a Hyderabadi Muslim American poet, interdisciplinary artist and recovering social justice lawyer. Her poetry has appeared in Apiary, Dusie and Mizna, and can be found in anthologies, including Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (Olive Branch Press, 2005), Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak (Beacon Press, 2005) and Shout Out: Women of Color Respond to Violence (Seal Press, 2008). Sham-e-Ali is the recipient of the Loft Literary Center Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship. ‘
Raquel Salas Rivera (Mayagüez, 1985) (he/him) is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and editor. His honors include being named the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia and receiving the New Voices Award from Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra. He is the author of five full-length poetry books. His third book, lo terciario/ the tertiary won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry and was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. His fourth book, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), was longlisted for the 2020 Pen America Open Book Award and was a finalist for CLMP’s 2020 Firecracker Award. His fifth book, x/ex/exis won the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. antes que isla es volcán/before island is volcano, his sixth book, is an imaginative leap into Puerto Rico’s decolonial future and is forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2022. He has co-edited two anthologies. Puerto Rico en mi corazón is a bilingual anthology based on a special collection of handmade letterpress broadsides by contemporary Puerto Rican poets. La piel del arrecife is the first anthology of Puerto Rican trans poetry. Thanks to a 2021 NEA Translation Fellowship, he will be translating the poetry of his grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania and writes and teaches in Puerto Rico.