Brooklyn Poets Reading Series

Join us for our next Brooklyn Poets Reading Series event at 144 Montague on Friday, September 20, featuring poets Megan Pinto, Diannely Antigua and Hala Alyan! 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.

Note that by attending the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy below. All in-person attendees for events are currently required to wear masks (regardless of vaccination status) except readers at a safe distance on stage. We will have masks available. 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.

Closed captions will be available for the event through the Zoom livestream. For more information and to request additional accommodations, contact us at bkp@brooklynpoets.org.

Featured Poets

Megan Pinto’s debut collection, Saints of Little Faith, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in September 2024. The winner of the 2023 Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Megan’s poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, and Storyknife, and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson. 

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024) and Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which won the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts–Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and she received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and she was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, Adroit and elsewhere. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet-in-Residence. In 2022, she was proclaimed the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch the Bread & Poetry Project, and in 2024 she was awarded an Excellence in Artistry Award from Black Lives Matter New Hampshire. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul.

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and, most recently, The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, the New York Times Book Review and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

COVID-19 Policy

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

The current metrics available, including NYC wastewater data and the CDC’s Respiratory Virus Activity Levels, both indicate high levels of COVID and other illnesses. While your personal risk tolerance may vary, the unmitigated spread of COVID and other respiratory illnesses disproportionately affects the most vulnerable in our community—including those who are immunocompromised or don’t have the privilege of 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.

We strongly encourage daytime visitors and workshop attendees to wear masks. Workshop instructors may choose to enforce a more stringent policy at their own discretion. Additionally, workshop participants may be required to wear masks as an accessibility accommodation for other participants.

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 anyone on our Conduct Committee and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Interim Director r kay: kay@brooklynpoets.org
Board Director Emily Blair: emiblair@gmail.com
Board Director Miller Oberman: miller.oberman@gmail.com