Welcome to the First Person Plural’s seventh year of showcasing literary and artistic excellence in Harlem, USA! Our next reading features authors Amanda Alcántara, Tyehimba Jess, Jacinda Townsend, and Vanessa K. Valdés on Sunday, February 17th at Silvana in Harlem from 6:00pm-8:00pm. 300 W 116th St (SW corner of 116th and Frederick Douglass Blvd). The First Person Plural Reading Series is hosted by Stacy Parker Le Melle. Admission is free! There will be cake! Here is more information about our stellar readers:

Amanda Alcántara is a writer and journalist. She is the Digital Media Editor at Futuro Media Group. Her work centers on various themes including Caribbean culture, womanhood, borders and blackness. She has been published on Latino USA, Remezcla, Latino Voices and Black Voices on The Huffington Post, The Washington Post’s The Lily, BESE, and The San Francisco Chronicle. In May of 2017, Amanda obtained a Master of Arts from NYU in Latin American and Caribbean Studies where her thesis focused on the experience of women residing on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Amanda is also a Co-Founder and previous editor of La Galería Magazine. She has also been published in the anthology Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA, published by Red Sugarcane Press. She has a BA from Rutgers University. A map of the world turned upside down hangs on her wall.

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.  It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Jess’ fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction.  Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and was longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize.

Jacinda took her first Creative Writing classes at Harvard, where she received her BA, and then cross-registered to take more classes through the English Department at Duke University, where she received her JD.  After practicing law for four years, she went on to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then spent a year as a Fulbright fellow in Côte d’Ivoire. She recently finished a novel called James Loves Ruth.  Jacinda is mom to two children, about whom she writes frequently.

Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is the director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York-CUNY. A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of peoples of African descent throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including the Caribbean and Brazil. She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017).