Join Brooklyn Poets on Saturday, February 24, for the return of Page Meets Stage, a poetry series founded in 2005 and curated by poet Taylor Mali. Featured poets Terrance Hayes and s.e. zelalem will read poems back and forth in a creative conversation, and Mali will emcee and ask the poets questions. Doors will open for a wine reception for in-person guests at 6 PM and readings will begin at 7.

Guests can purchase tickets to attend in person at 144 Montague or virtually via Zoom. Advance online ticket sales for in-person attendance will end at 5 PM on the day of the event. After that, tickets for in-person attendance can be purchased at the door until we reach capacity; tickets for virtual attendance will be available until the start of the readings at 7 PM. A Zoom link will be emailed to all ticket holders. Closed captions will be available for the event through the Zoom livestream. For more information and to request additional accommodations, contact us at bkp@brooklynpoets.org. Note that by attending this event, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy below. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.

Series History & Evolution

Originally the series was called Page vs. Stage, but it has never been a competition in any way. In fact, originally the series wasn’t a series at all. The very first pairing was in November of 2005 and featured Taylor Mali reading opposite his mentor and teacher Billy Collins. It was Bob Holman, the emcee that night and owner of the Bowery Poetry Club, who encouraged Mali to turn it into a semi-monthly series. Mali says, “We’ve had well over 100 pairings of Page Meets Stage, most of which are available on YouTube. In the beginning, I used to really care about the labels—about who was PAGE and who was STAGE. These days the lines are much more blurred, and ideally we pair poets who are accomplished on both ‘surfaces’ who will appreciate each other’s work and be able to have a conversation.”

About the Authors:

s.e. zelalem is an Ethiopian-American poet from Virginia and the winner of the 2023 Yawp Poem of the Year Award from Brooklyn Poets. She has a background in performance and slam poetry and is interested in time travel, gossip, first dates, illness and lineage. You can find her overplanning a dinner party, underpacking her bags, calling her mom back.

Terrance Hayes is the author of seven poetry collections: So to Speak; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Wind in a Box; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series; and Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His prose collection To Float in the Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, and his new book of prose, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry, came out in 2023. Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation and Whiting Foundation and is a professor of English at New York University.