The Poetry Coalition is proud to present:

Tonight, we were slated to gather at Busboys and Poets on 450 K Street in Washington, D.C. to hear the poetry of Teri Ellen Cross Davis and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes. Slated to join Letras Latinas as a co-presenter was Split This Rock: this was meant to be a “Pre-Festival” event on the eve of their 2020 Festival. This was meant to be Letras Latinas’ contribution to the Poetry Coalition’s 2020 March program:

I am deliberate

and afraid

of nothing

Poetry and Protest

COVID-19 changed all of that.

In a spirit of nimbleness and resourcefulness, our two poets rose to the occasion and accepted our invitation to produce the two videos below for your viewing and listening pleasure.

Enjoy them.

Please share them…from wherever you are sheltering in place:

This Poetry Coalition Program

is supported by

the Academy of American Poets

with funds from

the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, second-generation Colombian/Latinx immigrant, poet, artist, scholar, and activist. She is the author of the poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), which won the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her book was recently profiled in Poets & Writers annual Debut Poets feature. Her creative work has been published, exhibited, and performed in As/Us, Pank, Raspa, Word Riot, Feminist Studies, Huizache, the National Queer Arts Festival, The Sick Collective, the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, SomArts, and Galería de la Raza, among other places. She was a semi-finalist for the 2017 92-Y/Unterburg Poetry Center Discovery Contest. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Political Theory at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Born in Arizona and raised in California, she currently lives in Brooklyn. She can be found on Instagram at: @vessels.we.are

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of Haint, (Gival Press, 2016) winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry.  Her second book, A More Perfect Union, won the 2019 Charles B. Wheeler Prize, awarded by The Journal, and is forthcoming. She is a Cave Canem fellow and a member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective. She has received fellowships to attend  the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Community of  Writers Poetry Workshop, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is the recipient of a Meret grant from the Freya Project and a 2019 Sustainable Arts Grant. Her work can be read in: Academy of American Poets, Auburn Love’s Executive Order, Avenue, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Figure 1,  Gargoyle, Harvard Review, Kestrel, Little Patuxent Review, Natural Bridge, North American Review, MiPOesias, Mom Egg Review, Pacifica Literary Review, PANK, Poet Lore, Poetry Ireland Review, and Tin House. She is the 2019-2020 HoCoPoLitSo Writer-in-Residence for Howard County, Maryland, adjunct professor at George Washington University, and the Poetry Coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.  She lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.