This event is the third and final in a series of events curated by Cortney Lamar Charleston in collaboration with The BreakBeat Poets and Haymarket Books, to celebrate the release of his new collection, Doppelgangbanger.

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Speakers:

Cortney Lamar Charleston is originally from the Chicago suburbs. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a BS in Economics from the Wharton School and BA in Urban Studies from the College of Arts & Sciences. While attending Penn, he was most interested in the business as a political entity, the relationship between the public and private sectors and the physical and sociological construction of cities. It was during his college years that he began writing and performing poetry as a member of The Excelano Project.

Charleston's academic interests, coupled with his upbringing spent bouncing between Chicago’s South Side and its South and West suburbs, immediately influence his written work. Charleston’s poems paint themselves against the backgrounds of past and present; they grapple with race, masculinity, class, family, faith and how identity is, functionally, a transition zone between all of these competing markers. Said differently, his poetry is a kind of marriage between art and activism, a call for a more involved and empathetic understanding of the diversity of the human experience. This same line of thought frames his philosophy as Poetry Editor at The Rumpus. He also currently serves on the Alice James Books Editorial Board.

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Callaloo, BOAAT, Tin House, Milkweed Editions, and The Watering Hole. Julian is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Julian is the winner of the 2019 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle and the 2019 Frederick Bock Prize. His poetry has been published in New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and POETRY and anthologized in The Breakbeat Poets Vol.4, Nepantla and Furious Flower. He has essays in Vibe, Black Nerd Problems, and other venues. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Ole Miss. He is the author of Refuse (Pitt, Fall 2018), winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and a finalist for a 2019 NAACP Image Award, the Middle Grade novel Pilar Ramirez And The Prison of Zafa (Holt, Winter 2022). He talks a lot about poems and other things on Twitter at @JulianThePoet.

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.