Last Show: Friday, June 2, 2023

 Soul Sister Revue series finale event celebrated 10 years and asked the question “What does Soul mean to you?” Readers included Danez Smith (Homie, Don’t Call Us Dead), Ariana Brown (We Are Owed), Charif Shanahan (Trace Evidence), Eugenia Leigh (Bianca), Tameka Cage Conley, & Rachelle Parker.

Danez Smith is the author of three collections including Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead. They have won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez's poetry and prose has been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, Best American Poetry and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective. Former co-host of the Webby nominated podcast VS (Versus), they are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Princeton, United States Artists, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez has been featured as part of Forbes’ annual 30 Under 30 list and is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. They live in Minneapolis near their people.

Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from the Southside of San Antonio, Texas, now based in Houston, Texas. She is the author of the poetry collections We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). Ariana's work investigates queer Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, Black history and girlhood, loneliness, and care. Her debut poetry EP, LET US BE ENOUGH, is available on Bandcamp. She holds a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin, an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of North Texas. Ariana is the recipient of the 2019 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant for San Antonio Artists and a two-time Academy of American Poets Prize winner. She holds the title of 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion.

When she is not performing, she is probably giving book recommendations at her library, creating free online resources for writers, teaching a class, or reading a YA dystopian novel.

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs. Shanahan’s poems appear widely, in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and PBS NewsHour. His work has been anthologized in American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018), Furious Flower’s Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2019), and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020).

Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; the Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University; a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco; the Gregory Pardlo Fellowship from the Frost Place; and residency fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, La Maison Baldwin in St Paul, France, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among other awards and recognitions.

Eugenia Leigh (she/her) is a Korean American poet and the author of two collections of poetry, Bianca (Four Way Books, March 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), winner of the Late Night Library's 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry selected by Arisa White, as well as a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, The Nation, Guernica, Poetry, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Waxwing, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, the Best New Poets anthology, and the Best of the Net anthology. Poems from Bianca were awarded Poetry magazine's 2021 Bess Hokin Prize and received Special Mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, the Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere, Eugenia served previously as a poetry editor for Kartika Review and for Hyphen, a news/culture outlet that celebrates the Asian American diaspora. She currently serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary, a BIPOC-focused literary journal and literary arts organization

Tameka Cage Conley is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in Fiction. Her work is published in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, The African American Review and elsewhere. She has received writing fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. Cage Conley received her PhD from Louisiana State University in 2006, where she was a recipient of the Huel Perkins Doctoral Fellowship and recipient of the Lewis Simpson Distinguished Dissertation Award for her dissertation, Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female Circumcision from Africa to America. She is at work on her first novel, You, Your Father, an epic family saga that considers the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades beginning in the early 1940s in northern Louisiana.

Rachelle Parker is a Nassawadox born, Brooklyn bred writer. She was selected the winner of the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and Pat Schneider Poetry Contest. She placed third in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest and was an honorable mention in the Pat Dobler Poetry Award. She is a fellow of Tin House Summer Workshop Poetry, Callaloo Creative Writing at Brown University and Willow Arts Alliance. Her work can be found in Rhino Poetry, About Place Journal, The Adirondack Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lips and The New Jersey Council of Teachers of English Journal. She contributed poems to the anthologies: The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic and The Poeming Pigeon: Poems About Food. She serves as poetry editor for Peregrine. Spring 2021, Rachelle made her photography debut in Orion Magazine.

Founder/Curator

Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, 2023), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, and author of Blue Hallelujahs. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell Colony, and Château de la Napoule among other foundations. A storyteller and performer at literary festivals, libraries, universities, and museums, Manick and her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Brooklyn Rail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus and other outlets. She currently serves on the board of the International Women’s Writing Guild and the editorial board of Alice James Books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York but travels widely for poetry.