Lit Youngstown presents a poetry reading and book signing by Quartez Harris & Sony Ton-aime on Friday, May 6th at 7 PM in the sanctuary at St. John's Episcopal Church, 323 Wick Ave. Many thanks to our host St. John's.
Quartez Harris is a poet from Springfield, Ohio and the Ohio Poetry Association's 2021 Poet of the Year. Harris is the author of We Made It To School Alive, a full-length collection of poems published by Twelve Arts Press, and Nothing, But Skin, a poetry collection published in 2014 by Writing Knights Press. We Made It to School Alive was inspired by his work as a teacher and gives voice to the experiences of the children he works with every day who deal with structural barriers, intergenerational poverty, educational negligence and more. He is the first recipient of the Barbara Smith Writer-In-Resident at Twelve Literary Arts and a 2020 Baldwin House Fellow and his poetry and ideas have been featured in The Plain Dealer, Ideastream, and City Club of Cleveland. Harris' works in progress are two picture books and a young-adult novel in verse.
Sony Ton-Aime is a Haitian poet, essayist, and translator. He is the Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts at Chautauqua Institution. In addition to his chapbook, LaWomann (Ironworks Press, 2019), he is the author of a Haitian Creole translation of the book, Olympic Hero: The Lennox Kilgour’s Story. He is, with other Haitian scholars, putting together a Haitian Creole course on Duolingo. His works have appeared or forthcoming in Brainchild, La Revista Ping Pong, The Oakland Review, Dunes Review, Poets.org, Hunger Mountain Review, Cleveland Review of Books, Artful Dodge, among others.
This reading is part of an Arts Resiliency Initiative Community Project Awards funded by the Ohio Arts Council, Rob Briggs & Alyssa Lenhoff Briggs.
