Wednesday Aug 20, 2025
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
(jopappy and the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk is a frenetic multimedia jam session of discursive lyric arranged and produced by poems written in bandele’s invented prose poetic form the unit. The form gets its inspiration from virtuoso pianist Cecil Taylor’s groundbreaking 1966 album Unit Structures, insofar as it desires to embody the feel of collective improvisation encountered in Free Jazz as poetics. Through the application of Free Jazz aesthetics, the language is pushed toward a heightened ambiguity, as wildly different subjects and source materials are played right after, alongside, and over against one another generating new valences and surprising, even playful suggestions that are at odds with common interpretations of phrases. Enter here to experience Free Jazz as a groove theory, a language model, and an underlying approach to artistic expression.
About the Readers.
makalani bandele was raised in Louisville, KY, and still resides there. He is an Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem fellow. He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Obsidian Foundation, Kentucky Arts Council, Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a BA in the Program of Liberal Studies, as well as a graduate of Shaw University with a Master of Divinity in Biblical Studies, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky. His work has been published in several anthologies, and widely in print and online journals, African-American Review, Killens Review of Arts and Letters, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, and Sou’wester to name a few. Most recently works from his manuscript, (jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk, which won Futurepoem Books’ 2022 Other Futures Award and is slated to be published in 2024, appears in Washington Square Review, Poetry Northwest, The Common, and theHythe. He has two other full-length collections of poems under the aegis of a winged mind, winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize (Autumn House Press, 2020) and hellfightin’, published by Willow Books/Aquarius Press in 2011.
Jeremy Michael Clark is the author of The Trouble with Light, selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2024. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Common, Poem-A-Day, The Southern Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. His work has also been anthologized in Soul Sister Revue: A Poetry Compilation and Once A City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology. He has received support from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. A former editorial assistant at Callaloo, he received his MFA from Rutgers University-Newark and his MSW from the University of Pennsylvania. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, he lives in Brooklyn.
Sol Cabrini de la Ciudad is a performance artist, musician, poet-philosopher, filmmaker, and scholar from Chicago. She is the author of Tgirl.jpg, published by Roof Books, an imprint of the Segue Foundation. Under the alias Sol Patches, she composes music that interweaves sonic experimentation with cultural memory. Cabrini’s creative and academic work is deeply shaped by the movement and interconnections between her Louisiana-Mississippi-Tennessee heritage and Chicago — sites she considers vital to expression, creolization, study, and celebration.
Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, 2023), which received 5 stars from Roxane Gay, was named among the “Best Poetry of the Last Year” by Ms. Magazine, and was selected as a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023. She is the author of Brown Girl Polaris (a Belladonna chaplet), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry; and winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry for her first collection Blue Hallelujahs. Manick has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Château de la Napoule among other foundations. For 10 years she curated Soul Sister Revue, a quarterly reading series that featured emerging poets, poet laureates, and Pultizer Prize winners. Her poem “Things I Carry into the World” was made into a film by Motionpoems and has debuted on Tidal for National Poetry Month. Her work has also featured in VOICES, an audio play by Aja Monet and Eve Ensler’s V-Day. A storyteller and performer at literary festivals, libraries, and museums, Manick’s work can be found in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus and other outlets. She lives in New York, but travels widely for poetry.
About the Musical Guests.
Ras Moshe Burnett is a Brooklyn NY native and recent graduate of a SUNY degree program in music studies at Empire State College.