LINEAGE is a seasonal event honoring the relationships that sustain artists. Poets’ concerns, processes, and creations intersect, inform, support and challenge each other. In this reading series, one selected reader invites a mentor and a mentee to read alongside them, illuminating this sometimes subtle, sometimes urgent, golden thread of artistic lineage.

The inaugural LINEAGE reading features Erica Hunt, r. erica doyle, Elisabet Velasquez.

LINEAGE is organized by Emily Brandt for Wendy's Subway.

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Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of V Suite, Local History and Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes and A Day and Its Approximates. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, FENCE, Hambone, In the American Tree and Conjunctions. Essays on poetics, feminism, and politics have been collected in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women and The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of the 2018 anthology Letters to the Future, Black Women/Radical Writing from Kore Press. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/University of Capetown Program in Public Policy. Currently, Hunt is the Parsons Family Professor of Creative Writing at Long Island University in downtown Brooklyn.

r. erica doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents. Her debut collection, proxy (Belladonna* Books, 2013), won the 2014 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, and Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writing. Her poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and reviews appear in various journals, including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Apogee and Sinister Wisdom. She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. Erica is also a fellow of Cave Canem: A Workshop and Retreat for Black Writers. In addition, she has read her work at the Kennedy Center, the National Black Arts Festival, Joe’s Pub, the Nuyorican, the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica, WI and various colleges and universities. Erica received her MFA in Poetry from The New School, and lives in New York City, where she is an administrator in the NYC public schools, teaches creative writing to adults, has been a Poets House and St Marks Poetry Project mentor.

Elisabet Velasquez is a Boricua writer from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her work has been published by NBC, WeAreMiTu, AJ+. She is the 2017 Button Poetry Video Prize Winner. She is a VONA Alum, and a 2017 Poets House Fellow. She is the author of the chapbook PTSD.

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This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.