Join us on Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 7:00 PM EST as poets and writers Naomi Ayala and E. Ethelbert Miller lead us on a reading and talk in celebration of the life and work of Jason Shinder. Shinder, who founded the National Writers Voice Project, served as the Director of the Sundance Institute Writing Program and as faculty in the Bennington College MFA program. He authored three books of poetry and several anthologies, including The Poem that Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later. Poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller taught at Bennington with Shinder during his tenure there. A colleague and student of Shinder’s, Naomi Ayala’s essay on Shinder’s work, “The Practice of Returning,” appears in the summer 2021 issue of The Massachusetts Review.

E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV which received a 2020 Telly Award. Most recently, Miller received a grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and a congressional award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary activism. His latest book If God Invented Baseball, published by City Point Press, was awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Miller has two forthcoming books: When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories and the little book of e. (Please contact us for special order information.)

Naomi Ayala is the author of three books of poetry – Wild Animals on the Moon (Curbstone Press); This Side of Early (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press); and Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations (Bilingual Press, University of Arizona). She is the translator of Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s La arqueología del viento/The Wind’s Archeology, and La sombra de la muerte/Death’s Shadow, a novel by His Excellency José Tomás Pérez, the Dominican Republic’s Ambassador to the United States. Naomi has translated and published poems by Lope de Vega as well as the film script for the documentary Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas. Her most recent poems in English appear in Gargoyle, Barrelhouse, Poetry, Salamander, and DoveTales: Letters from the Self to the World. She has received artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts, U.S. Congressional Recognition for Community Service, and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy of Environmental Justice Award.

E. Ethelbert Miller’s photo credit, Rick Reinhard