Celebrating the Visiting Teaching Artists of Forms & Features

Join us for a virtual reading featuring the 2022 Forms & Features Visiting Teaching Artists: Cecilia Caballero, Christiana Castillo, Antoinette Cooper, Sara Elkamel, Ernest Ogunyemi, and Chessy Normile. Forms & Features is the Poetry Foundation’s series of free online creative writing workshops for adults.

Cecilia Caballero, PhD, is a poet, essayist, Ethnic Studies lecturer, and co-editor of The Chicana Motherwork Anthology. Caballero is teaching faculty with Catapult, and she has taught poetry workshops for the Puente Project, the University of Arizona, East Los Angeles College, and elsewhere. Her work appears in Dryland, Raising Mothers, The Acentos Review, among others; her honors include an Authentic Voices fellowship with the Women's National Book Association and nominations for Rhysling, Pushcart, and Best of the Net Awards. 

Christiana Castillo is a Mexican-Brasilian-American poet, educator, abolitionist, and gardener.

Antoinette Cooper is a writer and TEDx speaker committed to the liberation of Black bodies through arts, ancestral healing, social justice, and medical humanities. Born on the island of Jamaica and raised in the NYC Housing Projects, Cooper holds a Cornell BA, a Columbia MFA, and sits on the board of Narrative Medicine at CUNY School of Medicine. Her honors include a grant from Café Royal Foundation, a residency with BLKSPACE, and work in The Amistad, Intima: Journal of Narrative Medicine. www.antoinettecooper.com

Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist living between her hometown, Cairo, Egypt, and New York City. Elkamel earned an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is author of the chapbook Field of No Justice.

Ernest O. Ògúnyẹmí writes from Nigeria. Ogunyemi’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from AGNI, Kenyon Review, The Sun, Banshee, Mooncalves: An Anthology of Weird Fiction, among others. His debut chapbook, A Pocket of Genesis will be published in 2023. He is working toward a BA in History and International Studies at Lagos State University.

Chessy Normile is a writer from New York currently living in Madison, Wisconsin as the 2022–23 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Normile received an MFA in poetry from The Michener Center for Writers at University of Texas at Austin, and her first book of poems, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, was selected by Li-Young Lee for the 2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. She edits a zine series called Girl Blood Info.

The Zoom link will be shared with registered guests on the day of the event. Poetry Foundation’s events are completely free of charge and open to the public. This event will include CART captioning and ASL interpretation. For more information about accessibility at the Poetry Foundation, please visit our Accessibility Guide.