Join us for the launch of poet Ellen Kombiyil's collection of poems, Love as Invasive Species, on Saturday, September 21, at 144 Montague St and via Zoom! Free and open to the public. Doors will open for a wine reception for in-person guests at 6 PM and readings will begin at 6:30 PM. Lynn Melnick, Donna Masini, Jennifer Franklin and Angel Nafis will open for Kombiyil. Book signing to follow.

This event is free and open to the public. In-person attendees can reserve a copy of Love as Invasive Species with their registration.

Note that by attending this event, 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.

About Love as Invasive Species

Love as Invasive Species traces the poet’s matrilineal line to interrogate learned inheritances. The poet deftly resurrects (her) dead to interrogate memory, accuracy, and the way images overlap and combine to tell parts of the story as they touch upon trauma and the difficulty of reassembling “truth”. Ultimately, the book transcends its cast of characters to explore larger cultural themes of gendered power dynamics, expectations, reproductive rights, femininity, and female desire to ask—What grows from complex soil of inheritance? How do we (all) learn to love?

As the book tells a narrative of repetition and repeated patterns, the reassembled story is conceptually realized in the book-as-art-object design: Love as Invasive Species is formatted as a tête-bêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other in list order.

About the Author

Ellen Kombiyil’s (she/her) latest poetry collection Love as Invasive Species, a tête-bêche exploring matrilineal inheritances, is forthcoming with Cornerstone Press (University of Wisconsin) in fall 2024 as part of the Portage Poetry Series. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Pleiades and Ploughshares. She is a 2022 recipient of a BRIO Award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) from the Bronx Council on the Arts, a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, she currently teaches writing at Hunter College. Find her at www.ellenkombiyil.com.

About the Opening Acts

Lynn Melnick is the author of the memoir, I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton, from the University of Texas Press's American Music Series/Spiegel & Grau Audio (October 2022). The paperback is available from Spiegel & Grau. She is the author of three poetry collections, Refusenik (2022), the winner of the Julie Suk award, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017) and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), all with YesYes Books, and the co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015).

Donna Masini was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in NYC. She attended Hunter College and received her MFA in Poetry from New York University in 1988. Her latest collection of poems 4:30 Movie, an elegy for her sister, explores personal loss, global violence and the ways in which movies shape our imagination. Of her poems Adrienne Rich has said: “Donna Masini’s poems are on the wavelength of Whitman and Rukeyser but are inimitable her own: urban, sexual, working-class, passionate, marked by great moral intelligence and generosity. She is one of the marvelous new poets this country is generating in a terrible time.” A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, Pushcart Prize, et al, she is a Professor of English at Hunter College where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program.

Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length poetry collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023) and No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Her work has been published in the American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Blackbird, the Nation, the Paris Review and elsewhere. Franklin is the recipient of a 2021 New York Foundation for the Arts City Artist Corps Grant for poetry and a 2021 Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. She teaches in Manhattanville College’s MFA program and at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as program director.

Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Angel Nafis is a writer and the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, BLACK FUTURES, the Rumpus, Poetry, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow and the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. With poet Morgan Parker, she is The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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