Open Door Reading Series: Xandria Phillips, S. Yarberry, kiki nicole & Red Samaniego

This event has been updated with the link to a video.

The Open Door series presents work from new and emerging poets and highlights writing instruction and poetic partnerships. Each event features readings by two Chicagoland writers and two of their current or recent students or writing partners. 

Xandria Phillips is a Whiting Award-winning poet, and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of a LAMBDA Literary Award, and the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging writers, Xandria is the author of HULL (Nightboat Books 2019) and Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. They have received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, Oberlin College, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and are the 2021-2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Fellow. Xandria’s poetry has appeared in Berlin Quarterly Review, BOMB Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Yarberry’s writing has appeared in Tin House, Indiana Review, The Offing, Notre Dame Review, The Boiler, Nat Brut, Bomb Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and miscellaneous zines, among others. They currently serve as the Poetry Editor of The Spectacle. Yarberry has an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and is a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern University as a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Poetry and Poetics.

Red Samaniego writes about freak love, border worlds, and being a better communist. Samaniego is  the 2019–2020 Junior Fiction Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis; the 2019 Sandra Cisneros Fellow at Under the Volcano in Tepoztlan, Mexico; a 2018 Hattie Fitz Walker Scholar at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA; and the 2018–2019 Editorial Assistant at Dorothy, a publishing project. They're at work on a novel, and can be found on Instagram @curveofjoy and Twitter @notyrmomscandy.

kiki nicole (they/them) is a poet and artist who works to archive Very Black Feelings. They have been invited to join fellowships and workshops with Pink Door Writing Retreat, The Watering Hole, In Surreal Life, and Winter Tangerine. Individual poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Shade Journal, beestung mag, Peach Mag, and more. They are currently a Poetry Editor at Muzzle Magazine and the 2021 Citizen Literary Fellow at Graywolf Press. They live in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Poetry Foundation's events are completely free of charge and open to the public. This reading will include live captioning and ASL interpretation. If you require any other accessibility measures, please contact us by emailing [email protected]. To find out more about Zoom’s own built-in accessibility features, please visit https://zoom.us/accessibility