Three poets read from their new work: Lara Mimosa Montes, Chaun Webster, and Erin Sharkey

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer based in New York and Minneapolis. Her book The Somnambulist has recently been published. Her work has appeared in Fence, BOMB, The Third Rail, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Currently, Lara teaches poetry at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and works as a contributing editor for Triple Canopy. She was born in the Bronx.

Chaun Webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work draws from an interest in the sign of graffiti, the layering of collage, simultaneity, & the visuality of text. Webster utilizes these methods in investigating race - specifically the instability of blackness and black subjectivities, geography, memory, and the body. Correspondingly much of these investigations engage the question of absence, how to archive what is missing from the landscape particularly as a number of communities watch, in real time, neighborhoods once populated with familiar presences dissolve in the vernacular of redevelopment and its attendant colonial logic. Webster's first book, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in the fall of 2018.

Erin Sharkey is a writer, producer, educator and graphic designer based in Minneapolis. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University and is the co-founder of an artist collective called Free Black Dirt. Erin co-hosts Black Market Reads, a podcast about literature and black cultural production and has appeared in publications such as Walker Art Center's Untitled and Paper Darts. Erin is a 2016/17 Loft Mentor Series winner in creative nonfiction. She was a 2016 VONA/Voices Travel Writing fellow, 2015 Givens Foundation for African American Literature Emerging Writers fellow, a Givens Foundation cultural producer-in-residence as well as a Coffee House Press in the Stacks artist-in-residence at the Archie Givens Sr. Archive at the University of MN, where she now is helping to promote Umbra Search, a digital search tool for African American memory.