In-Person | Saturday | September 7 | 4-6pm | Free with RSVP

Join us for a special performance by the Cornelius Eady Group and readings by Merrick Sloane and Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador in celebration of the release of the PAINTING EP. This event is free and open to the public. Digital copy of the EP, PAINTING, with $10 donation. All donations benefit Poets House.

From Cornelius Eady: Come help me continue to celebrate my 70th birthday year while helping to support one of the best homes for poetry in the country. Our latest project, PAINTING, is an eight track acoustic EP that we’re very proud of, and when thinking of places to launch it we realized there couldn’t be a better location than Poets House, a place where all sorts of singing thrives. If you haven’t dropped by to check out Poets House’s rise from the ashes, this is your excuse. If you’ve been missing my January birthday parties, this is your chance to gather. If you’ve been wanting to hear the three of us live in New York, something that doesn’t happen that often, your opportunity has just sailed in.

About the Performers:

Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English, and the John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence in Poetry at the University of Tenn. Knoxville, a position last held by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2001. His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Lisa Liu is a guitarist based in Brooklyn, NY. She plays gypsy jazz, experimental, folk, and solo guitar. Liu is an Artist Ambassador for Santa Cruz Guitar Company and is also endorsed by Krivo Pickups. She is a Teaching Artist at Django In June, and has also been an Artist In Residence at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

NYC based guitarist/composer Charlie Rauh has been invited to be resident composer by such organizations as The Rauschenberg Foundation, The Klaustrid Foundation, and The Chen Dance Center. His work as a soloist has been supported by grants from Meet The Composer, The Untitled Artist Group, and The Fractured Atlas Group. Rauh’s approach to solo guitar composition takes inspiration from folk lullabies, plainchant, and the imagery of various poets ranging from the Brontës to Anna Akhmatova. Acoustic Guitar Magazine notes that “Charlie Rauh plays guitar with a quiet intensity, each note and chord ringing with purpose…With these lullabies Rauh gives a gentle reminder that playing soft and slow can be more impactful than loud and fast.” Rauh is currently signed to the Austin based label Destiny Records as a soloist and recording artist.

About the Poets

Born and raised in México, Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador (she/ella) is a poet, editor, interpreter-translator, and MFA student at The University of Tennessee. She is a British Centre for Literary Translation, Under The Volcano, Community of Writers, and Letras Latinas fellow. Her work has been published in Aster Lit, FlowerSong Press, The McNeese Review, and elsewhere. She is working on her first poetry collection and is the Nonfiction Editor for Grist Journal.

Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet from OKC who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. Their chapbook, Queerly Beloved, was self-published in 2020. Their work has appeared in the first and only gender and sexuality journal in Oklahoma, The Central Dissent, and in Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication. Merrick was a 2020 and 2021 DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium fellow. Currently, Merrick serves as the Poetry Editor of Grist, and as the host of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s reading series Chiasmus where they are pursuing their MFA. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved.