Readings by NYU MFA alumni, A.H. Jerriod Avant, J.D. Debris, and January O’Neill, followed by a reception/signing.
Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here
About the Authors:
A. H. Jerriod Avant is the author of Muscadine (2023) from Four Way Books. He is from Longtown, Mississippi. A graduate of Jackson State University, Avant has earned MFA degrees from Spalding University and New York University. He’s a recipient of support from Vermont Studio Center, the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, and Naropa’s Summer Writing Program. Avant has received two winter poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a 2019 emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. He curated a special series of Poem-a-Day from August 17–August 28, 2020 and serves as a teaching fellow in English at Wesleyan University.
J.D. Debris is a poet and fiction writer from Salem, Massachusetts. His debut collection of poems, The Scorpion’s Question Mark, was selected by Cornelius Eady for the Donald Justice Prize. He received his MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow. His work has received further awards from DISQUIET, Ploughshares, and Narrative. A failed rockstar and washed-up boxer, he still makes music and fights sometimes. He is at work on a novel about two ex-boxers who, believing they’re cursed, fall in with a secret society of Catholic leftists.
January O’Neil was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and received a BA from Old Dominion University and an MFA from New York University.
O’Neil is the author of Glitter Road (forthcoming CavanKerry Press, 2024); Rewilding (CavanKerry Press, 2018), recognized by Mass Center for the Book as a notable poetry collection for 2018; Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, 2014), winner of a 2015 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and Underlife (CavanKerry Press, 2009).
The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant and was named the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019–20 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford.
O’Neil is an associate professor of English at Salem State University and and currently serves as the 2022–23 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writers Programs (AWP). She lives in Beverly, Massachusetts.
