Exhibit B + P&T present SUPER SECRET AFTER-SHOW at Secret Pour

P&T Knitwear, in conjunction with Exhibit B, is pleased to present an off-site reading featuring Rosebud Ben-Oni, Jan-Henry Gray, Thea Matthews, Ariane Powell, and Alex Wells Shapiro at Secret Pour in Brooklyn! This reading will follow the first day of the 11th annual New York City Poetry Festival on Governor's Island.

RSVP ENCOURAGED

• This is a free offsite event
• All guests must be vaccinated to attend, and must provide proof of vaccination in order to enter the event. We request all guests wear masks. All guests must be 21 years or older to attend.
• The reading will be followed by a book sale.

PRAISE FOR OUR READERS

"Ben-Oni’s poems are ecstatically and unabashedly feminist, queer, punk, Latinx, and Jewish, making hers a unique and vital voice for our times." — Chicago Review of Books "The brilliance of Documents rests within its ability to remind us that poetry is everywhere, from how ‘we breathe and cloud the windows’ to how ‘I lift my palms upwards, as if to say: Let us sing a song made up of a single word.’" — Christopher Soto, author of Diaries of a Terrorist & contributor to Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color "Unearth [The Flowers] sees the pastoral tradition of poetry through a contemporary feminist lens that shows Thea Matthews as a writer of urgency and authentic concern.” — Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition "[Insect Architecture is] an astute and unflinching commentary on societal and ecological dysfunctions.” — Kirkus Reviews

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which received a Starred Review in Booklist and was a Finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and the chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which appears online in Black Warrior Review (2020), in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday.

Jan-Henry Gray is the author of Documents (BOA Editions Ltd.), chosen by D.A. Powell as the winner of the Poulin Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Selected Emails (speCt! Books.) His writing can also be found in Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Margins, and other journals. Jan was born in the Philippines, grew up in California, and worked as a chef in San Francisco for more than 12 years. He lived undocumented in the US for more than 32 years. A graduate of San Francisco State University and Columbia College Chicago’s MFA program, he received the inaugural Undocupoets Fellowship and awards from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. A Kundiman fellow, he currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Adelphi University where he is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program.

Thea Matthews is a poet, author, and educator originally from San Francisco, California. She earned her BA in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; and holds an MFA in creative writing – poetry from New York University. Her poetry has appeared in Southern Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Tahoma Literary Review, Foglifter Journal, The New Republic, Green Mountains Review, and others. She has been nominated for Best New Poets 2022 by Tahoma literary Review; and her work has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her collaboration with micro press & reading series Red Light Lit resulted in the publication of Unearth [The Flowers] in 2020; and the poetry collection was listed as part of Kirkus Reviews’s Best Indie Poetry of 2020. Currently, Thea serves as the Donald Everett Axinn Fellow at the Academy of American Poets; and teaches craft seminars, as well as workshops, at the Writing Salon.

Ariane Powell is an actor, writer, & the author of the forthcoming book SMUT. She is represented by Lauren Bieker at FinePrint Literary Management.

Alex Wells Shapiro graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 with an MFA in Writing. He reads submissions for Frontier Poetry, serves as Business and Grants Manager for Another Chicago Magazine, and co-curates Exhibit B: A Reading Series presented by the Guild Literary Complex. He is the author of a full length collection of poems, Insect Architecture  (Unbound Edition 2022), and a chapbook, Gridiron Fables (Bottlecap Features 2022).

ABOUT EXHIBIT B

Founded by School of the Art Institute of Chicago alums J. Howard Rosier, Alex Shapiro, James Stewart, and Ian Wojcikiewicz, Exhibit B—a performance series sponsored by the Guild Literary Complex—pushes artists to think beyond the typical limitations of a reading and develop new ways to bring their work into the world. “We don’t want to tell people what to do, we just want to create a space for people to express themselves,” shared Rosier. At Exhibit B, this means that writers experiment with new forms—poets turn their work into video essays—and artists who don’t traditionally exhibit at readings, like photographers, have a new outlet for their work. More than anything else, the founders want the shows to be accessible to all audiences in a way that readings typically haven’t been.