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Brave, Unbodied Scheme featuring: Edwin Torres, Heather Christle, James Sherry, Joey De Jesus, & Wendy Xu
Join us at the McNally Jackson Seaport, Manhattan’s own coastal refuge, as we present an evening featuring a range of brilliant minds from NYC’s poetry scene.
The title for this new monthly series comes from Herman Melville’s poem “Art”. Poetry, wine, and the sea have always been inextricably intertwined. This reading series seeks to highlight poets from all over the city, and give them a backdrop of McNally Jackson’s Seaport location to read their new work. Join us to hear poems, drink wine, and enjoy the “pulsed life”.
This month’s reading features Edwin Torres, Heather Christle, James Sherry, Joey De Jesus, & Wendy Xu
About the Poets:
Wendy Xu is the author of three collections of poetry including The Past (2021), and Phrasis (2017), named of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere. A new book Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire is forthcoming Oct 2025 in the Poets on Poetry Series. She is an assistant professor of writing at The New School.
James Sherry is the author of 15 books of poetry and prose. His selected works, Comin’ ‘Round, is just out (Chax Press, 2025). Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2022. His most recent poetry book, Entangled Bank, was published by Chax Press in 2016. Since 1976, he has edited Roof Books and Roof Magazine, publishing nearly 200 titles of seminal works of language writing, flarf, conceptual poetry, new narrative, and environmental poetry. He started The Segue Foundation, Inc. in 1977, producing over 5,000 events of poetry and other arts in NYC. For more, see jamessherry.net.
Edwin Torres is a multi-disciplinary artist from NYC, his books include; Quanundrumill be your many angled thing (Roof Books, awarded a 2022 American Book Award), Xoeteox: the infinite word object (Wave Books) and Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press). He has received fellowships from Arts MidHudson, NYSCA, The DIA Foundation, and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others. Anthologies include; New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archives, The Difference Is Spreading: 50 Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, Poets In The 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, and Aloud: Voices from The Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He is currently an Adjunct Poetry Professor at Columbia University.
Heather Christle is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Paper Crown. She has also published two works of nonfiction: In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf and The Crying Book. Her work has appeared in London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Poetry. She teaches creative writing at Emory University.
Joey De Jesus is the author of HOAX Limited Artist Edition (Operating System, 2022), and chapbooks: We Animate the Dream: A Poet’s Run for Public Office (Mount Analog Political Pamphlet Series II, 2021) and NOCT- The Threshold of Madness (The Atlas Review, 2019). Joey received the 2019-20 BRIC ArtFP Project Room Commission for HOAX and 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry. Poems have appeared in Poem-A-Day, Barrow Street, Bettering American Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Museum, The Texas Review, and elsewhere. Joey is senior co-editor at Apogee Journal and lives in Ridgewood where they ran an abolitionist campaign for New York State Assembly District 38.