March Town Hall: Poetry

For our March Town Hall, A4 is celebrating the literary arts by gathering poets and spoken word artists to share their work, resources, and opportunities with each other and the wider AAPI creative community.

Featured presenters include Sreshtha Sen, poet and a 2024 Margins Fellow with AAWW, who will share about their manuscript-in-progress titled Nice Face, a collection of poems exploring poetic form to adopt desires of [trans] masculinity and migration while interrogating inversely gendered and nationalistic performances of violence and power.

We’ll also hear from Taiyo Na, writer, musician, and activist, who will be sharing pieces from his in-progress collection of poems and stories.

Additionally, the evening will feature a line-up of brief pitches from the community. After the presentations, we’ll host a potluck meal, so please bring something to share; homemade or store bought items are welcome. A4 will provide drinks.

The event will be hosted at Culture Lab LIC, a nonprofit art gallery, performing arts venue, and community center in Long Island City, Queens.

This event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP is required to attend and/or pitch, but you do not have to pitch to attend.

For pitching guidelines and other information about A4 Town Halls, please visit our FAQ. If you have additional questions, please email programs@aaartsalliance.org.

Accessibility: Culture Lab LIC is wheelchair accessible and has gendered restrooms.

If you need CART Transcription, ASL interpretation, large print, or any other accommodations for this event, please email programs@aaartsalliance.org at least one week before this event.

To keep everyone safe and healthy, if you are not feeling well, please stay at home. We will provide masks and hand sanitizer at check-in.

About Sreshtha Sen

Sreshtha Sen is a poet from Delhi. They studied Literatures in English from Delhi University, completed their MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and their PhD at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their work can be found published or forthcoming in Apogee, bitch media, Gulf Coast, Hyperallergic, Hyphen Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Margins, Mcsweeney’s, Rumpus and elsewhere. She has previously worked at Poets & Writers, The Believer, and UNLV, and is currently an Assistant Professor in expository writing at NYU.

About Taiyo Na

Taiyo Na is a writer of poems, songs, stories and curricula who lives on unceded Lenape land (Queens, NY). The 2010/2011 collaboration album Home:Word under the outfit Magnetic North & Taiyo Na (MNTN) included a number of chart-topping songs in Asia, and his “Artist Takeovers” playlist was featured on Spotify in 2017. His writing has appeared in Kweli Journal, Poets House and in the anthology We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books). He’s currently working on a collection of poems and stories.

About A4’s Town Hall

Town Hall is A4’s longest running community gathering event that features presentations, pitches, and power networking over a potluck meal occurring every other month. We welcome artists of all disciplines, as well as arts organizations, to share upcoming projects, find collaborators, or discover new opportunities in a lively space.