#ObsidianVoices

avery r. young is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, a 3Arts Awardee, one of four executives for The Floating Museum, and Poetry Editor for Bridge. His poetry and prose are featured in several anthologies and periodicals including; Berkeley Poetry Review 49, Poetry Magazine, and photographer Cecil McDonald Jr’s In The Company of Black. He is the featured vocalist on flutist Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening (FPE Records), and young’s latest full-length recording, tubman (FPE Records), is the soundtrack to his first collection of poems, neckbone: visual verses (Northwestern University Press).

Rosamond S. King is a creative and critical writer and performer. Rosamond’s poetry publications include All the Rage (2021), the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone, and poems in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies, including The Feminist Wire, Hyperallergic, Harriet, and The Caribbean Writer. Her book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination was named “Best Book” by the Caribbean Studies Association. King is creative editor of sx salon and associate professor at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York.

 Moderator

Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, librettist, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee, and a Cave Canem fellow. He’s published six books and teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Most recently, he published Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). BOMB says: “[Buck Studies] remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” A Howard University and CalArts alum, Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in St. Paul. www.douglaskearney.com