Brooklyn Poets Benefit Reading ft. Isabella DeSendi, Julia Kolchinsky, Eugenia Leigh & Megan Pinto

Join us on Saturday, April 26, as members of the Brooklyn Poets community read to raise funds to support Brooklyn Poets programs, fellowships & operations. Featured readers include Isabella DeSendi, Julia Kolchinsky, Eugenia Leigh & Megan Pinto. Doors will open at 6pm.

Guests can donate to attend on a sliding scale—please contribute what you can. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, your donation to keep poetry and community accessible is matched through this Saturday, April 26th, up to $1000.

So far this year, we’ve continued our work making poetry accessible and building community by offering 30 workshops serving almost 300 students, including 16 fellows and 19 fellowship finalists who took part for free or at a reduced cost. We’ve hosted almost 20 events including readings, debut book launches and benefits, and our space in Brooklyn Heights offers free community programming four days per week.

We’re dedicated to continuing this work, but we can’t do it without the support of our community. With arts funding being cut nationally, individual support from poets and poetry lovers like you enables us to continue creating these spaces. Your donation will directly enable us to offer free weekly writing, reading and submission jam groups, remain open to the public as a community space five days a week and offer fellowships and financial aid for our workshops, poetry festival, craft labs and more.

Advance online ticketing for in-person attendance will end at 5 PM on the day of the event. After that, guests can get tickets at the door until we reach capacity; tickets for virtual attendance will be available until the start of the readings at 7 PM. A Zoom link will be emailed to all ticket holders. 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. 

Note that by attending this event, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy. 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. 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

Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in Poetry, the Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Someone Else's Hunger, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2025. Her chapbook, Through the New Body, won the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Recently, she was named a 2025 New Jersey poetry fellow, included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, and was named a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and Rattle’s $15,000 Poetry Prize, among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop and the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and she holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Julia Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don't Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS and PARALLAX (University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist for the Miller Williams Prize selected by Patricia Smith. Her next book, When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), is a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan. Her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, Shenandoah and the Account, and won Michigan Quarterly Review's Prize in Nonfiction and she is working on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia's birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Her poems and essays have appeared in publications such as Time, the Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, Waxwing and the Best of the Net anthology. Eugenia serves as a poetry editor at Adroit and as the Valentines editor at Honey Literary. She also serves as Board President at Brooklyn Poets.

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books, 2024). Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.

COVID-19 Policy

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 email feedback@brooklynpoets.org, which will send your message to everyone on the Conduct Committee noted below, or if you’d prefer you can contact anyone listed individually and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Executive Director r kay: kay@brooklynpoets.org
Board President Eugenia Leigh: eugenia.leigh@gmail.com
Board Co-Vice-President Miller Oberman: miller.oberman@gmail.com