EC Poetry & Prose Collective: Black History Is All Our History
Join us at Bird in Hand in collaboration with The Ivy Bookshop in welcoming members of the EC Poetry & Prose Collective for a reading, performance and conversation entitled Black History is All Our History.
Responding in part to the decision to reject the African American AP course in various states – specifically Florida, a state rich with Afro/Caribbean history – the poets will share words that connect and shed light on the interlacing of the history of America.
Clifford Bernier’s The Silent Art won the Gival Press Poetry Award. He is also the author of Dark Berries and Earth Suite, each selected by the Montserrat Review as a Best Chapbook. He appears in The Write Blend poetry circle collection and accompanies the Voices of Woodlawn poets on harmonica. In addition, Mr. Bernier appears on harmonica in the Portuguese “Accumulated Dust” world music series and is featured on the EP Post-Columbian America, performs “harmonica poems” at Poetry X Hunger events and plays regularly in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. He has been featured in readings in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Washington, DC area, including the Library of Congress, the Arts Club of Washington, George Washington University (where he is a member of the Washington Writer’s Collection) and the Bethesda Writer’s Center. He has been a reader for the Washington Prize and a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Poetry Out Loud recitation contest. From 2003-2008 he hosted the Poesis reading series in Arlington, Virginia and performed with the Jazzpoetry band at venues in and around Washington, DC. He has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Award.
Zorina Exie Frey is the Editor-in-Chief of 45 Magazine Journal and Poetry Editor for South 85 Journal. Her writings are featured in Shondaland, Shoutout Miami, Chicken Soup for the Soul: I’m Speaking Now, The American Journal of Poetry, and Glassworks Magazine. Her poem, “Pee is for prejudice,” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Voices of Color Fellow. Her screenplay, Harley Quinn Origin, received an honorable mention at the Birmingham Film Festival in the UK; she is one of the semi-finalists in the TV pilot America’s Next Greatest Author and a guest co-host for Writing Class Radio Podcast.
Kari Martindale is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and spoken word artist who has been published in various literary journals and anthologies. She sits on the Board of Maryland Writers’ Association and is co-editor of Pen-in-Hand. She has an M.A. in Linguistics, manages EC Poetry & Prose, and values kindness over niceness and justice over peace.
Patti (Spady) Ross graduated from Washington, DC’s Duke Ellington School for the Performing Arts. As a lifetime learner her most recent certificate is in Writing for Social Justice from the University of California, Berkeley. Her debut chapbook, St. Paul Street Provocations, was released in 2021 by Yellow Arrow Publishing; she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poem “Indemnity”. Patti also hosts EC Poetry and Prose Open Mic at the Baltimore County Arts Guild’s Catonsville Maryland location. She is the founder of the online series First Fridays under the organizational umbrella of Maryland Writers Association of which she is a former board member. She also actively supports several Baltimore youth nonprofits as both board member and advisor. A lifelong advocate for the disenfranchised and homeless, Patti writes poems about the racially marginalized as well as society’s traumatization of the human spirit. Her poems are published in the Pen In Hand Journal, PoetryXHunger website, and Oyster River Pages: Composite Dreams Issue, Writing the Land: Foodways and Social Justice Anthology (2022) as well as other online Zines.
Patti is the first Poet in Residence for the AA Food Bank in partnership with PoetryXHunger. Follow her blog at: https://littlepisuniverse.co
This event will take place at Bird in Hand Coffee & Books. It is free and open to the public.
