Assembly

Join poets Jerriod Avant, Tina Cane, John Murillo, and Prageeta Sharma for readings of their recent work.
Free. Registration required. After registering an email will be sent with a Zoom link to access the program.
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This program is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
A.H. Jerriod Avant is from Longtown, Mississippi. A graduate of Jackson State University, he has earned MFA degrees from Spalding University and New York University. Jerriod has received two winter poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is a graduate teaching assistant pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Rhode Island.
Born and raised in New York City, Tina Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The Literary Review, Spinning Jenny, Tupelo Quarterly, Jubliat, and The Common. She also co-produces, with Atticus Allen, the podcast, Poetry Dose. Cane is the author of The Fifth Thought (Other Painters Press, 2008), Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz (Skillman Avenue Press, 2016), Once More With Feeling (Veliz Books, 2017), and Body of Work (Veliz Books, 2019). In 2016, Tina received the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry, from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She is also a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets and the creator/curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread.
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020), finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, NAACP Image Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  His other honors include two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.  Recent poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020.  He is an assistant professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada University.  
Prageeta Sharma's recent poetry collection is Grief Sequence out from Wave Books. She published Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013), Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies and Art. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award and a finalist for the 2020 Four Quartets Prize, she taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.
Artists working in a variety of disciplines and mediums share their work in the program series, Assembly. These encounters present creative interpretations, inclusive practices, and sensory experiments in museum spaces.
Image: Photograph of Tina Cane by Cormac Crump