Quintessential Poetry: YouTube

The Episode is PrerecordedYvonne Brewer is originally from County Offaly, Ireland and lives in Cork, Ireland. She has had poetry published since 2014 with Women's Spiritual Poetry, including in their fourth anthology “Goddess: When She Rules: Expressions of Contemporary Women” (Dec 2017) Motherhood has taken her down a very creative path and her writing is greatly influenced by her children, her dreams, nature and fairies.In 2013 Yvonne self published an e-book called “Breathe and Bloom.Soul Mother Meditations”, 10 pregnancy meditations that she was inspired to write during her second pregnancy.She also has had poetry published with the Blue Nib and her poetry has been read on several audio poetry radio shows of American poet Tamara Miles “Where the Light Most Falls” broadcast by SpiritPlantsRadio.comPrior to Motherhood , Yvonne studied in University College Cork graduating in 1994 with a Degree in Social Science and in 1996 with a Masters in Social Science (Youth and Communit…

Sara Cahill Marron is a relocated Queens, New York poet currently living in Washington, D.C. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Language & Literaturefrom St. John’s University, Sara moved to D.C. to pursue a degree in law at the George Washington University Law School. Poetry is her compass at the intersections of art & law. She is the author of Reasons for the Long Tu’m (Broadstone Books, 2018). Her workhas been published widely in literary magazines and journals such as Dark Matter, Chagrin River Review, Foliate Oak, Gravel, Crab Fat Magazine, Gravitas, Atlas + Alice, Joey & the Black Boots, The Write Launch, Cordella, and Newtown Literary. You can follow her on Instagram @saracmarron or twitter @misswind_ or read more of her work here: www.saracahillmarron.com

Catfish McDaris has been active in the small press world for 30 years. His biggest seller is Prying: with Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski. He has four walls, a ceiling, heat, food, a woman, a daughter, one cat, a typing machine, and a mailbox. Sometimes he gets lucky and someone publishes his words. In 1998 he read at a big Beatnik gathering in Cherry Valley, NY at Ginsberg’s farm. Catfish McDaris served in the Army artillery shooting 155 MM Howitzers. His dad was on the Bataan Death March and his older brother did two tours in Vietnam and retired as a sergeant major. Catfish is an aging New Mexican living near Milwaukee. His work has recently been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Mandarin, Bengali, Mandarin, Tagalog, and Esperanto. His 30 years of published material is in the Special Archives Collection at Marquette Univ. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Catfish McDaris2368 S. 59th St.West Allis, WI 53219U.S.A.Mcdar3@aol.com

This Episode is PrerecordedAlatishe Kolawole wishes to embody integrity. His dream and his vision are to become a positive example for many young people, all over the world. Faith - an invisible power - and the will to grow humanly even when times are hard and difficult guide and inspire his work. The poet has the certainty that the right wins over iniquity. He has faith that the sun will rise again, life will go on and things will improve in some way. Somehow, even when it seems impossible. His poetry is aimed primarily at boys and girls all over the world. His verses have been published in the Punch Papers (Arts & Culture), Wildfire Publications Magazine (United States), The Poet's Attic World Anthology (United States), Genoa Poetry, (Italy) and other literary magazines. Alatishe travels through the stages of life trying to anticipate the future. His poetry collection Welcome to the Poets Residence and We Need a Road on this Broken Heart are scheduled for 2020 "Immerse your feet i…

Dee Scribes has been a poet and cultural record-keeper since second grade. She uses language to highlight the needs of her community and her personal journey through life. She's been featured at The Gathering, P.O.G, National Arts & Humanities Celebration for Ebenezer AME Church, AWAKE and many other events in the DMV and Chicagoland area. She is CEO of Dee.Core Accessories, which allows her and her clientele to show their creativity through fashion. Although she holds a M.S. in instructional design and development, her favorite form of communication is hip-hop.  A true B-girl/round-the-way girl for the south suburbs of Chicago, the realness of her message and heart of her cadence is bound to make every venue your favorite classroom.

BIO: Bio: Alan King is the author of Point Blank (Silver Birch Press, 2016) and DRIFT (Willow Books/Aquarius Press, 2012). He's a Caribbean American, whose parents emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago to the U.S. in the 1970s. He’s also a husband, father, and communications professional who blogs about art and social issues at alanwking.com. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he holds a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. He’s been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize and was a Best of the Net selection. He’s currently working on the DRIFT audiobook.  He lives with his family in Bowie, Maryland. 

Alatishe Kolawole wishes to embody integrity.His dream and his vision are to become a positive example for many young people, all over the world. Faith - an invisible power - andthe will to grow humanly even when times arehard and difficult guide and inspire his work. The poet has the certainty that the right wins over iniquity. He has faith that the sun will rise again, life will go on and things will improve in some way. Somehow, even when itseems impossible. His poetry is aimed primarily at boys and girls all over the world. His verses have been published in the Punch Papers (Arts & Culture), Wildfire Publications Magazine (United States), The Poet's Attic World Anthology (United States), Genoa Poetry, (Italy) and other literary magazines. Alatishe travels through the stages of life trying to anticipate the future. His poetry collection Welcome to the Poets Residence and We Need a Road on this Broken Heart is scheduled for 2020 "Immerse your feet in this river of hope" by Alatishe …

Joseph Ross is the author of four books of poetry: Raising King (2020), Ache (2017), Gospel of Dust (2013) and Meeting Bone Man (2012). His poems appear in many places including, The Los Angeles Times, Poet Lore, Southern Quarterly, Xavier Review,, Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Drumvoices Revue. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and won the 2012 Pratt Library/Little Patuxent Review Poetry Prize. He recently served as the 23rd Poet-in-Residence for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society in Howard County, Maryland. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. and writes regularly at www.JosephRoss.net.

Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA in creative writing, from American University. He has studied poetry under Dr. Tony Medina at Howard University and Cornelius Eady at American University. He is a graduate of the Cave Canem and VONA Voices summer workshops. His work has appeared in such literary journals as The Little Patuxent Review, Colorlines, The This Mag, and Vinyl online. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.    He worked as a bookseller andbook buyer for a bookstore which is operated by the nonprofit Teaching for Change. He was thefounder of The Nine on the Ninth, a critically acclaimed monthly poetry series that ran from 2005-2015 at the 14th & V street location of Busboys and Poets. He was the 2012-2013 Writer-In-Residence of the Howard County Poetry Literary Society, of Maryland. He is also a participating DC area author for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation’s Writers-in-Schools program. He’s performed at such esteemed venues as The Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe and the Bowery. H…

Bill Cushing has lived in Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Florida, Maryland, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico before moving to California. As an undergrad, he was called the “blue collar” poet by classmates at the University of Central Florida because of his years serving in the Navy and later working as an electrician on oil tankers, naval vessels, and fishing boats before he returned to college at the age of 37. He earned an MFA in writing from Goddard College in Vermont and teaches at East Los Angeles and Mt. San Antonio colleges, residing in Glendale with his wife and their son. As a writer, Bill has been published in various literary journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Birders World and The San Juan Star. His short stories have appeared in Borfski Press, Newtown Literary Journal, and Sediments. He had poems in both volumes of the award-winning Stories of Music. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, both in print and online, including Avocet, Brow…

J. P. Dancing Bear is editor for the Verse Daily and Dream Horse Press. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently, Cephalopodic (Glass Lyre Press, 2015. His most recent book, Fishing Singing Foxes came out in March of 2019 by Salmon Poetry. His next collection, Of Oracles and Monsters, which will be released by Glass Lyre Press in the fall of 2019. His work has appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies including American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, Plume, Quarterly West, and others.Editor, Verse Daily editor/owner, Dream Horse Presstwitter.com/jpdancingbear

Todd Cirillo is a writer, poet, publisher and pirate. He is one of the originators of After-Hour Poetry and co-founder and editor of Six Ft. Swells Press. His books include: Burning the Evidence (Epic Rites Press, 2017), Sucker’s Paradise, Sexy Devils, Still a Party, This Troubled Heart and ROXY and Three For the Road (which he co-authored) among others. Todd is widely known for his poetry performances. He has been published in numerous national and international publications and on cocktail napkins everywhere. Todd lives in New Orleans, Louisiana and can be found soaking his pirate heart in second lines and smiling under the neons searching for shiny moments. You can find books, videos, poems at toddcirillo.com 

Tzynya Pinchback is the author of the chapbook, How to Make Pink Confetti (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Poems and essays from her current manuscript, Tulle, have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Journal, the Aurorean, Mom Egg Review, Midnight & Indigo, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She writes about things at www.tzynyapinchback.com.The primary mission of Quintessential Listening: Poetry is to provide a live format for emerging, mid-career and established poets to showcase their work. Whether traditional poetry or spoken word, the show offers an online vehicle for artists to engage in critical dialogue and discussion about poetry.

Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and the MacDowell Colony among others. Winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, Manick was also awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. She is Founder and Curator of the reading series Soul Sister Revue; and her poem "Things I Carry Into the World" was made into a film by Motionpoems, an organization dedicated to video poetry, and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month. A performer at literary festivals, libraries, universities, and most recently the Brooklyn Museum, Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Robin Martin.

Jessica Lyew-Ayee Flynn started her life journey in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United States at the age of eight and has since lived in various cities across the country. Her poetry explores topics on mixed-race heritage, culture shock, and the challenges within interracial marriage and cross-cultural love.The primary mission of Quintessential Listening: Poetry is to provide a live format for emerging, mid-career and established poets to showcase their work. Whether traditional poetry or spoken word, the show offers an online vehicle for artists to engage in critical dialogue and discussion about poetry.

Adam Shames is a poet, singer-songwriter, musician, storyteller and workshop leader whose collection of poems, Dreaming of Corners (http://kreativity.net/creative-vault), is available from Lulu Press (http://www.lulu.com/shop/adam-shames/dreaming-in-corners/paperback/product-23316909.html). He founded the Kreativity Network (http://kreativity.net) in San Francisco, where he first brought groups of people together for salons, jams and workshops to explore creativity, later expanding it into his consulting practice in Chicago, through which he has designed and led leadership retreats, innovation sessions and collaboration experiences for thousands of adults and youth. Now living in DC, Adam has also been executive director of a non-profit interfaith creativity program, and is a former “Teacher of the Year” with a master’s degree from Stanford University.    

Valeri Beers is from Bangor, Maine. Her first book of poems titled ...details... published by Thomas Hill Publishing. This is her second poetry book titled "Scratching The Surface", published by Underground Writer's Association.  She has been writing all her life and is inspired to write by listening to music and needing to remember things. Valeri has been published in a number of literary magazines including anthologies by Literature Today, Lit House, The Wicked, Poets of Maine, Qutub Minar Review, Clockwise Rain, Literature Today (Vol. 1-7), Our Day of Passing, Dandelion in a Vase of Roses and Poetry Pasta  She has links to her poems on her own poetry site: wordsoftheval2000.wordpress.com. You can also connect with her on Facebook (Valeri Beers) and Twitter (@theval2000). She has been a guest poet on Quintessential Listening: Poetry before talking all things poetic and reading her own poems. Valeri also helps take poetic care of Poetry Pasta (www.poetrypasta.wordpress.com), an onlin…

Indran Amirthanayagam (www.indranmx.com) is an American poet and diplomat, He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published sixteen poetry collections thus far, including the just-released Coconuts on Mars (www.paperwall.in), En busca de posada (Editorial Apogeo, Lima, 2019) and Paolo 9 (Manofalsa, Lima, 2019).  The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, NY, 1993) won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States. Uncivil War (Tsar/Mawenzi House, Toronto, 2013) tells the history of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, NY, 2008) was written in the wake of the Asian Tsunami of 2004. Other books include Il n'est de solitude que l'île lointaine (Legs Editions, Haiti, 2017), and Ventana Azul (El Tapiz del Unicornio, Mexico City, 2016), In music, he has released Rankont Dout (available to download from all the music stores). He has written on poetry for the blog  http://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com…

Drew Kerr is a PhD student in anthropology. While he intends for his research to engage the anthropology of militarized zones, he utilizes poetry as a tool to reflect, digest, and present his own and interlocutors’ struggles living the realities of such spaces. Having lived in India during the formative years of his political and social orientations, Drew draws on revolutionary forms and themes of South Asian poetries. Recently, Drew's exploration in poetry and performance has been nurtured by the community of the Washington, DC Guerilla Poetry Insurgency.  

Jessica Philie Park is a founding member of the DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency (GPI) and co-hosts the GPI Open Mic (https://bossadc.com/events/dcgpi-open-mic-night) every second Tuesday of the month at Bossa in Adams Morgan. She has lived in DC for 24 years and works as a bookkeeper. She started writing in her teens and did her first open mic in her twenties. Her pieces are inspired by current events and personal growth. Jessica thinks anyone could and everyone should give an open mic a shot, because it’s amazing to share with others and find out we all have so much in common.

Heather Corbally Bryant teaches in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. She has taught at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan, and Harvard College where she won awards for her teaching. She received her A.B. with honors in History and Literature from Harvard. She received her PhD in Literature from the University of Michigan. Her academic publications include, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War (University of Michigan Press, 1992). It was awarded the Murphy Prize for best first book. In 2018, she published her work of creative nonfiction, You Can’t Wrap Fire in Paper, which explores her grandmother’s years as a journalist in Shanghai during the 1920s. Since 2011 she has published six books of poetry with the Finishing Line Press: Cheap Grace, Compass Rose, My Wedding Dress, Thunderstorm, Eve’s Lament, and James Joyce’s Water Closet (forthcoming). The Parallel Press Poetry Series of the University of Wisconsin at Madison p…

John MacDonald is a Maryland poet living in Silver Spring, near Washington, DC. He experiments in a variety of styles of poetry and poetry performance. His poems have appeared in various publications, including Gargoyle Magazine, Haiku Journal, Poetry Quarterly, and Dual Coast Magazine. Seven of his poems appear in Music of the Aztecs, an anthology featuring poets from the Washington, DC area. He has directed and presented several choral presentations of his poems, as a guest of the Performetry @ BloomBars series in Washington, DC, and is an occasional guest poet for Poetic License and Poetic Resistance, two poetry-inspired improvisational comedy troupes based in Washington, DC.

"Once again, Ahmad Alkhatat uses his excellent writing talents to create sorrowful but beautiful images, this time as he visits the place of his birth, Baghdad, Iraq. The book begins with poems that describe his feelings about the visit and what he sees. “The Cost of Cigarettes,” “In A Random Street in Baghdad,” “Wounds From Iraq,” “At the Airport” and “Baghdad Taxi.” all denote images of the flavor and culture of Baghdad itself. Ahmad also shows his heart and sympathy for what is happening or has happened within Iraq and Syria with such poems as “Flooding in Aleppo,” “The Crying Girl on the Border” and “My Colorful Sorrows In Iraq.” We expect poets to show emotion within their work, but not all do it with such heartbreaking ‘hit on the mark.’ Mr. Alkhatat always has a wish for peace that can be seen in the form of a prayer in his books. This book contains at least two prayers for peace and comfort for Iraq and neighboring countries, “Send My Salutations” and “Will the Gate of Mesopot…

Unstoppable by Design is a play that explores the life of Matt Rifenburg who at times has been homeless, friendless, hungry, married to someone addicted to drugs,  a clueless father trying to raise his son, and a man losing his job and being diagnosed with a brain tumor in the same week.  Refusing to give up, he applies for a job at Cornell University. Will his determination to overcome be enough to convince the interviewers he is worthy of a design position in the particle physics lab despite dropping out of school at 15 and never returning or will this be the end of his journey?Biographical sketches of the artists involved in the production of Unstoppable by Designhttps://1drv.ms/w/s!At_9Hw2EcAFFgjN2I1mp2JuS8lcE