The next Brooklyn Poets Reading Series event at 144 Montague on Friday, September 29, will feature poets Paul Hlava Ceballos, Yesenia Montilla and Kwame Dawes! This is an official 2023 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event. Free and open to the public, the event will also be livestreamed via Zoom. Wine reception for in-person attendees will begin at 6 PM and readings will begin at 6:30. Book signing to follow.

Advance online ticketing for in-person guests will end at 5 PM on the day of the event. After that, in-person guests will be admitted at the door until we reach capacity. In-person guests are encouraged to get a ticket in advance, as space is limited. Virtual tickets will be available until start time at 6:30 PM (ET). A Zoom link will be emailed to all ticket holders.

Closed captions for the event will be available via Zoom. To request additional accommodations or more information, please contact us. Note that by attending the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy below. We strongly encourage all attendees to wear masks (regardless of vaccination status) except readers at a safe distance on stage. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of this code. Thank you for respecting our community.

About the Poets:

Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His collaborative chapbook Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood shares pages with Quenton Baker, Christina Sharpe and Torkwase Dyson. He has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and Poets House, and he has been featured on the Poetry podcast and Seattle’s the Stranger. His work has been translated into Ukrainian. He currently lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography.

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet and a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in poetry and poetry in translation. She is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and Best American Poetry 2021 and 2022. Her first collection The Pink Box, published by Willow Books, was longlisted for a PEN Open Book award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body, published by Four Way Books, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2023.

Kwame Dawes has authored 36 books of poetry, fiction, criticism and essays, including, most recently, Nebraska (UNP, 2019), Bivouac (Akashic Books, 2019) and City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern, 2017). Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press), cowritten with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared in 2016. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is also a faculty member in the Pacific MFA program. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.