Celebrating the Visiting Teaching Artists of Forms & Features

Join us for a virtual reading featuring 2023 Forms & Features Visiting Teaching Artists Samira Asma-Sadeque, Giulia Ottavia Frattini, grace (ge) gilbert, Lisa Low, L. Renée, and Hua Xi. Forms & Features is the Poetry Foundation’s series of free online creative writing workshops for adults.

Samira Asma-Sadeque is a New York-based Bangladeshi journalist, poet, and educator. She writes about the immigrant experience, mental health, hate speech, and gender violence in both her poetry and journalism. Her poetry appears in HBO’s Take Out with Lisa Ling, PBS’s ALL ARTS, Button Poetry, and has been featured at the Rubin Museum, among other platforms. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow, Tin House alum, and Best of the Net nominee. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, and Al Jazeera, among other publications.

Giulia Ottavia Frattini is a poet and writer based in Berlin. She is currently involved in art-oriented practices and collaborates as a contributor for several art magazines while developing her literary path. She perceives words as metamorphic elements, and her prime focus gravitates toward the unfolding of identity, language’s physicality, and lyricism's disruption.

grace (ge) gilbert is a hybrid poet, essayist, and collage-worker based in Brooklyn. They received their MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022. grace is the author of three short collections: the closeted diaries, NOTIFICATIONS IN THE DARK, and today is an unholy suite. Their work can be found in the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Passages North, The Offing, the Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. They currently teach hybrid collage and poetics courses at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. They have received support and scholarships from City of Asylum's Emerging Poet Laureate program and Bread Loaf, and served as the MCLA Under 27 Writer-in-Residence Fellow at Mass MoCA.They are passionate about making the hybrid arts accessible to all. Learn more at gracegegilbert.com.

Lisa Low’s poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, the Massachusetts Review, Poetry, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction won the 2020 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize. She has an MFA from Indiana University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Cincinnati. Her debut chapbook, Crown for the Girl Inside, won the 2020 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming from YesYes Books.

L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer living in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she works as assistant director of Furious Flower Poetry Center and assistant professor of English at James Madison University. Nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and two Pushcart Prizes, her work has been published in Obsidian, Tin House Online, Poetry Northwest, the minnesota review, and elsewhere. The granddaughter of proud Black Appalachians, she won the international 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize and Appalachian Review’s Denny C. Plattner Award, among others. A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and the Watering Hole, L. Renée holds an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, where she was nonfiction editor of the Indiana Review, and an MS in journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow. She has received support from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc., Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Peter Bullough Foundation, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Monson Arts, Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, and others. Learn more at Lreneepoems.com.

Hua Xi (she/they) is a poet and artist. Their poetry has appeared in the New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. They previously won the Boston Review Poetry Contest and was the 2022 Poet-to-Come Scholar at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. They sometimes teach poetry workshops with the Spatial Poetry Project. 

Photo Credits: Samira Asma-Sadeque by Harsh Mall; Giulia Ottavia Frattini courtesy of Giulia Ottavia Frattini; grace (ge) gilbert courtesy of grace (ge) gilbert; Lisa Low by Ellie Earley; L. Renée by Jeffrey Albright, The Peter Bullough Foundation; Hua Xi courtesy of Hua Xi.

The Zoom link will be shared with registered guests on the day of the event. Poetry Foundation 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.