Emerging Poets of Color

Reading followed by book signing.  Co-Sponsors include: Multicultural Student Programs and Services, Africana Studies, Graduate School, Gender Studies, American Studies, the English Department, Letras Latinas, and the Creative Writing Program.

Christopher Soto (aka Loma) is a queer latinx punk poet & prison abolitionist and author of the chapbook Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016). They cofounded The Undocupoets Campaign with Javier Zamora & Marcelo Hernandez Castillo in 2015, and together, the Undocupoets were awarded the Barnes and Noble Writer's Writer award, previously given to authors like Junot Diaz and Margaret Atwood. Loma has been named as an emerging poet to watch out for in articles such as 10 Up and Coming Latinx Poets You Need to Know by Remezcla. They edit Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color with the Lambda Literary Foundation. 

Nate Marshall’s first book, Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, was listed on several Top Poetry Books of 2015. Recently nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award, and he is a coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015), he earned his MFA at the University of Michigan, where he served as a Zell postgraduate fellow. He is a founding member of the poetry collective Dark Noise. A Cave Canem fellow, the star of the award winning full-length documentary Louder Than a Bomb, he has been featured on the HBO original series Brave New Voices. Marshall received the 2014 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award for College Writers and the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.