Literati is pleased to welcome Shira Erlichman and Angel Nafis for the latest installment of Poetry at Literati.
Born in Israel, living in Brooklyn, SHIRA is a songwriter, producer, writer & visual artist. She has shared stages with CocoRosie, Mirah, TuNe-YaRdS & Andrea Gibson. A three time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in PBS Poetry, Buzzfeed Reader, The Huffington Post, BUST Magazine, Winter Tangerine, The Massachusetts Review, as well as alongside Patricia Smith in Bull-Gouging the Matador, in the anthology Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls and the Lambda award winning LGBTQ anthology Glitter and Grit. She received her BA from Hampshire College, a Millay Colony Fellowship & a James Merrill Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center.
Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and is an MFA candidate in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Rattling Wall, The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, MUZZLE Magazine, The Rumpus, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. In 2011 she represented the LouderArts poetry project at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. With poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn with artist, writer, and musician Shira Erlichman. In 2016, Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.