Join us for our next Brooklyn Poets Reading Series event at 144 Montague on Friday, April 5, featuring poets with Cindy Juyoung Ok, Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Monica Youn! Free and open to the public, the event will also be livestreamed via Zoom. Wine reception for in-person attendees will begin at 6 PM and readings will begin at 7. Book signing to follow.

Advance online ticketing for in-person guests will end at 5 PM on the day of the event. After that, in-person guests will be admitted at the door until we reach capacity. In-person guests are encouraged to get a ticket in advance, as space is limited. Virtual tickets will be available until start time at 7 PM (ET). A Zoom link will be emailed to all ticket holders.

Closed captions for the event will be available via Zoom. To request additional accommodations or more information, please contact us. Note that by attending the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy below. Effective January 8, 2024, all event attendees except readers at a safe distance on stage are required to wear masks due to the current rise in cases in NYC. Our full policy can be found at the end of the event description. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.

Featured Poets

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets. A MacDowell Fellow and Kenyon Review Fellow, her poems are published in journals including the Nation, New England Review, and the Iowa Review. She was a physics teacher at a public high school before teaching university creative writing.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a multi-award winning poet, nonfiction writer, scholar, screenwriter and translator. He is the author of The Ground, Heaven, Living Weapon, Silver, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness and The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. Phillips has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Osterweil Prize for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the GLCA New Writers Award and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.

Monica Youn is the author of four poetry collections, most recently From From, which was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Her previous books have been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Open Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and she has been awarded the Levinson Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, a Witter Bytter Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. A former constitutional lawyer and a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute, she is a professor of English at UC Irvine. For 2024–2025, she will be the Theodore H. Holmes and Bernice Holmes Visiting Poet at Princeton's program in creative writing.

COVID-19 Policy

Effective January 8, 2024, all event attendees are required to wear masks due to the current rise in cases in NYC. Masks will be available at the door.

We are implementing this change because, according to the latest data, we are in the second-largest surge in cases of the pandemic. The current metrics available, including NYC wastewater data and the CDC’s Respiratory Virus Activity Levels, both indicate very high levels of COVID and other illnesses that continue to increase.

While your personal risk tolerance may vary, the unmitigated spread of COVID disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in our community—including those who are immunocompromised or don’t have the privilege of taking paid sick days to heal and recover. We hope you’ll join us in taking the actions we can to make our space welcoming to all and to keep each other safe. Please stay home if you are experiencing symptoms, have a positive COVID test or someone close to you has recently tested positive.

While we do our best, Brooklyn Poets cannot guarantee zero risk. A risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in all public settings. By entering the building, students, teachers and other attendees accept the risk of exposure and knowingly waive and release Brooklyn Poets from any liability related to COVID-19.

Brooklyn Poets Code of Conduct

Brooklyn Poets will not tolerate any instances of discrimination, harassment or abuse in conjunction with any of our programs. Respect and consideration for others, both within and outside our programs, are core values to be upheld by all participants. Discrimination against and/or harassment of community members on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, religion, age, marital status, veteran status or any other factor is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Program participants are expected to adhere to all federal, state and local laws and regulations. Should a board or staff member, independent contractor, volunteer or program participant be found to violate any aspect of the organization’s code of conduct, Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss them from the program. Consequences may include, but not be limited to, dismissal from the current activity, suspension, ineligibility for all future activities, and/or loss of payment or fees. If you have any issues to report, please do not hesitate to contact Executive Director Jason Koo (koo@brooklynpoets.org) or Deputy Director renée kay (kay@brooklynpoets.org), and they will get back to you as soon as possible.