The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Winter Literature Grant to Queens College MFA alum zakia henderson-brown for her upcoming collection of poems “Power Theory”.

Since 2007 the foundation has supported and fostered talented artists of all kinds, enabling them to enhance their craft and realize their artistic vision. The awards are established to support and encourage artists residing in New York City who are currently working in music, visual arts, performance and literature.

zakia henderson-brown is a 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Poetry Fellow and the author of What Kind of Omen Am I, winner of Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Cate Marvin. She was a Poets House Emerging Poets fellow, and has received additional fellowships and support from the Fine Arts Work Center, Callaloo Journal, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Cave Canem. Her poems have appeared in Adroit, African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Brooklyn Review, Burner Magazine, Epiphany, Little Patuxent Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Reverie, No, Dear, North American Review, Obsidian, the Offing, Thethepoetry.com, Torch, Under a Warm Green Linden, Vinyl, Washington Square Review, and the anthologies New Daughters of Africa (Amistad: 2019) and Why I Am Not a Painter (Argos: 2011).

She has worked as a community organizer at Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement; as a researcher at UNITE HERE!, a resource coordinator at Break the Chains: Communities of Color and the War on Drugs; and as a research associate at the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College. She completed the 2010 Activate! organizing fellowship at Social Justice Leadership and is an emerita board member of the Brooklyn Movement Center, where she co-founded the anti-gendered and sexualized street harassment collective, No Disrespect.

zakia was selected as a finalist for the 2021 Publishers Weekly Star to Watch program, selected as a finalist for the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize by A. Van Jordan, nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023 by Under a Warm Green Linden and in 2013 by Beloit Poetry Journal, and has been in residence at the T.S. Eliot House, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. She currently serves as a senior editor at nonprofit publisher The New Press. She is a Brooklyn native and loyalist.

Power Theory focuses on how different actors navigate, exercise, and grapple with power across different contexts. Overall, the project focuses on the mundane, fraught, and necessary ways we connect with one another in the natural and socially constructed worlds, across both time and circumstance. But these poems also explore the ways we alternately wield and relinquish power *in order to* connect, especially in times of great conflict. Some of these poems explore family loss, and the ensuing grief that comes along with it; the sometimes transcendent experience of mourning, and how we must relinquish power to truly heal. Some of the poems in the manuscript explore how women exercise and navigate power in the face of daunting, entrenched patriarchal obstacles. Still others of these poems explore how to grapple with power in a racialized and social justice context, the seemingly never-ending push and pull that we all must engage. The poems explore all of these while remaining at turns tonally playful and somber, and experimenting with conventions of the line and sonnets.

Please visit zakia’s website or Instagram for more information.

MFA alum Jonathan Alexandratos isn’t just in this collection of plays by eight non-binary playwrights, called Beyond the Binary. They created the book, pitched it to Next Stage Press, edited it, contributed a play, its introduction, and wrote its preface.

This is one of the great things about the MFA Program at Queens College: it teaches you to be a self-starter. No one waits to be handed a stipend or have doors opened for them here. Jonathan saw the need for this collection to exist and created this love letter to nonbinary joy!

You should preorder your copy now!

Gender non-binary theatre has a long and diverse history, yet modern stages scarcely spotlight its stories. Beyond the Binary: Eight Non-Binary Plays changes this by presenting short plays from non-binary playwrights that intersect with race, class, religion, politics, and pop culture. Audiences can meet Joan of Arc, hear toys talk, visit New York City, feel the heartbeat of a family, and more – all through the lens of non-binary playwrights. These pieces can be assembled into an evening of theatre that centers non-binary experiences, or they can be broken up and integrated into larger events. They are also ideal for classroom use and individual inspiration. The plays contained here are a love letter to non-binary joy, and they can’t wait to celebrate with you.

MFA alum Todd Sullivan is going to be doing an interview for the journal After Dinner Conversation, which publishes on April 28th!

After Dinner Conversation, as you may remember, was the journal that nominated Todd for a Pushcart Short Story Award, for his story “One Hour,” late last year.

We’re so excited for you, Todd! Click the link to sign up, so you can be excited too!

https://afterdinnerconversation.substack.com/p/q-and-a-with-after-dinner-conversation-3d9

MFA alum Rebecca Suzuki’s award-winning chapbook, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, is listed as number four on Small Press Distribution’s Poetry Bestsellers!

When My Mother Is Most Beautiful is the most recent winner of the Loose Translations Award from Hanging Loose Press, which publishes a work of translation from a Queens College MFA student each year. Partnering on this award with this respected independent press celebrates what our program is all about: Language. Culture. Community. We have built not just our translation track, but our entire program on these pillars.

When My Mother Is Most Beautiful is at once a powerful love letter to a mother and to language itself, delving into complex questions of family, communication, culture, and connection. These poems chronicle the difficult art of navigating multiple cultural identities, examining how languages twist and morph across cultures through the imperfect act of translation, how they bind people together and keep them apart, and even how they could be reimagined to make a better world.

Pick up your copy today directly from Hanging Loose!

https://www.hangingloosepress.com/book/when-my-mother-is-most-beautiful/

Professor Jason Tougaw has a new piece on Psychology Today, on Dory Previn, hearing voices, and the new documentary about her–Dory Previn: On My Way to Where.

Go check it out!

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-elusive-brain/202403/dory-previns-voices

There are two stunning poems in The New Yorker and O Bod by the Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah, which have been co-translated by QC MFA professor Ammiel Alcalay. Go check them out! (Links below:)

“Untitled” (The New Yorker)
“A house that looks like your laugh” (O Bod)

Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963 and lives there. Like all Palestinians presently in Gaza, he and his family have been forcibly displaced. He got his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985, before going on to work as Director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union and has published five collections of poetry, Running After Dead Gazelles (2003); One of Nobody (2010); Passersby with Light Clothes (2013); Water Thirsty for Water (2016); Eulogy for the Robin (2020), and a novel, Since approximately an hour (2018). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French, and Hebrew. The translators, Ammiel Alcalay, Khaled al-Hilli, and Emna Zghal, are working on a collection of Nasser Rabah’s poems for City Lights, due out in Spring 2025.

Emna Zghal is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. She was trained in both Tunisia and the United States and has shown her work in both countries and beyond. Reviews of her exhibits have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Artforum, among other publications. Noted public collections include the Newark Museum, Flint Institute of Art, Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, The Africa Center, NY, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY. emnazghal.com

Poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay’s over 20 books include After Jews and Arabs (University of Minnesota Press, 1992), Memories of Our Future (City Lights, 2001), and the forthcoming CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books (Litmus Press).

Khaled al-Hilli teaches Arabic at New York University and is completing a doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center on the post-2003 Iraqi novel. His Sargon Boulos: “This Great River” Translating the Beats into Arabic, is due out from Lost & Found in 2024.

The Brooklyn Raga Massive’s Ragini Festival posted a clip of MFA Rajiv Mohabir talking about his memoir, Antiman, as a reminder that he’ll be taking the stage at Joe’s Pub tonight! (3/21/24)

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4waDy8tD2t/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Rajiv will be reading poems and singing ancestral songs as part of “Acoustic Fulcrums,” a diasporic night representative of Caribbean memory, language, and iconic sound culture.

There’s still time to get tickets!

https://publictheater.org/productions/joes-pub/2024/r/ragini-fest/

MFA alum Eleanor Whitney has a new essay up on The Coil/Medium called “Finding My Femme-inism: Riot Grrrl’s Influence on Identity” about how music helped Eleanor discover more about herself.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Eleanor W (@killerfemme)

Go read it now!

https://medium.com/the-coil/finding-my-femme-inism-riot-grrrls-influence-on-identity-64661cf508e6