Special Guests Malaika Jabali, Esha Krishnaswamy & Ross Barkan.
Poets Maya Popa, Mark Doty & Meher Manda.
7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Poets read
8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Spotlight panel with special guests: “Movement politics in the electoral process”
About the Guests:
Malaika Jabali is a frequent contributor to The Guardian and writer/activist whose work has appeared in Afropunk, Essence, The Root, The Intercept, Glamour Magazine and elsewhere. Her writing on race and politics has led to appearances on NPR, BBC Radio, and a sit-down with Oscar-winning director Michael Moore on his Rumble podcast, among others. Her debut political feature in Current Affairs Magazine, “The Color of Economic Anxiety,” was awarded the 2019 New York Association of Black Journalists Media Award for Newspaper/ Magazine feature. A Columbia Law School graduate, Malaika was an Articles Editor for the Columbia Journal of Race & Law.
Esha Krishnaswamy went to University of Michigan as an undergraduate and law school. She worked at corporate law for a while, but when Bernie Sanders campaign came in 2015, it lit a passion inside her. She taught Law at RMIT in Australia. She is also interested in the Economic analysis of Law, especially Modern Monetary Theory. She has presented in the Modern Monetary Theory Conference and the Moscow Academic Economic Forum in 2019. She also hosts a podcast called
historic.ly, which attempts to decolonize history. She writes about various progressive issues. She has been published in
FAIR and
Jacobin among other progressive media. She is deeply interested in US imperialism. Especially the economic aspects of it, which do not get enough attention in the media as well as institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.
Ross Barkan is an author and journalist from New York City. He is a columnist for The Guardian and a contributor to The Nation and Gothamist. He has been a columnist for the Village Voice and his journalism and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Columbia Journalism Review. He is the author of the novel Demolition Night and a former candidate for office. He is also an adjunct professor of journalism at NYU.
Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith (runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong), as well as two chapbooks, You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave and The Bees Have Been Canceled (PBS Summer Choice). She is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation, Oxford Poetry Society, and Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, among others. Popa is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and an English teacher and director of the Creative Writing Program at the Nightingale-Bamford school in NYC, where she oversees visiting writers, workshops, and readings.
Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane (April 2015), Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book Award, and My Alexandria, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize in the UK. He is also the author of three memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling Dog Years, Firebird, and Heaven’s Coast, as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word. Doty has received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize.
Meher Manda is a poet, short story writer, culture critic, and educator from Mumbai, India, currently based in New York City. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the College of New Rochelle where she founded the literary journal, The Canopy Review. Her debut chapbook of poetry, Busted Models was published by No, Dear Magazine in Fall 2019. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in Epiphany Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Glass Poetry, Lumina, Newtown Literary, and is forthcoming in Hobart Pulp and They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Poetry. She is currently at work on her debut poetry manuscript and a short story collection, both centred around Indian women.
About the Series:
Rising Blades at The People’s Forum is arguably the only New York City venue showcasing politically-engaged poetry, heeding Walt Whitman’s counsel as he
urged poets to rise like blades against authority. In addition to featuring subversive poets, each episode will also include a spotlight interview and town hall with an activist, journalist or researcher doing work related to the theme.
About the Host:
Karthik Purushothaman has had poems in magazines such as Boulevard, Hyperallergic, Rattle, and Writers Resist, and has been on NYC stages such as The
Delancey, Knitting Factory, Bowery Poetry, and Andrew Yang’s May 14 Washington Square Park rally.
