Quintessential Poetry

The Episode is Prerecorded Yvonne Brewer is originally from County Offaly, Ireland and lives in Cork, Ireland. She has had poetry published since 2014 with Women's Spiritual Poetry, including in their fourth anthology “Goddess: When She Rules: Expressions of Contemporary Women” (Dec 2017) Motherhood has taken her down a very creative path and her writing is greatly influenced by her children, her...

Sara Cahill Marron is a relocated Queens, New York poet currently living in Washington, D.C. After earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Language & Literaturefrom St. John’s University, Sara moved to D.C. to pursue a degree in law at the George Washington University Law School. Poetry is her compass at the intersections of art & law. She is the author of Reasons for the Long Tu’m...

Catfish McDaris has been active in the small press world for 30 years. His biggest seller is Prying: with Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski. He has four walls, a ceiling, heat, food, a woman, a daughter, one cat, a typing machine, and a mailbox. Sometimes he gets lucky and someone publishes his words. In 1998 he read at a big Beatnik gathering in Cherry Valley, NY at Ginsberg’s farm. Catfish McD...

This Episode is Prerecorded Alatishe Kolawole wishes to embody integrity. His dream and his vision are to become a positive example for many young people, all over the world. Faith - an invisible power - and the will to grow humanly even when times are hard and difficult guide and inspire his work. The poet has the certainty that the right wins over iniquity. He has faith that the sun will rise ag...

 Dee Scribes has been a poet and cultural record-keeper since second grade. She uses language to highlight the needs of her community and her personal journey through life. She's been featured at The Gathering, P.O.G, National Arts & Humanities Celebration for Ebenezer AME Church, AWAKE and many other events in the DMV and Chicagoland area. She is CEO of Dee. Core Accessories, which allows her and...

BIO: Bio: Alan King is the author of Point Blank (Silver Birch Press, 2016) and DRIFT (Willow Books/Aquarius Press, 2012). He's a Caribbean American, whose parents emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago to the U.S. in the 1970s. He’s also a husband, father, and communications professional who blogs about art and social issues at alanwking.com. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he holds a Master's of Fine...

Alatishe Kolawole wishes to embody integrity. His dream and his vision are to become a positive example for many young people, all over the world. Faith - an invisible power - andthe will to grow humanly even when times arehard and difficult guide and inspire his work. The poet has the certainty that the right wins over iniquity. He has faith that the sun will rise again, life will go on and thing...

  Joseph Ross is the author of four books of poetry: Raising King (2020), Ache (2017), Gospel of Dust (2013) and Meeting Bone Man (2012). His poems appear in many places including, The Los Angeles Times, Poet Lore, Southern Quarterly, Xavier Review,, Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Drumvoices Revue. He has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and won the 2012 Pratt Library/Little Patuxent Rev...

Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA in creative writing, from American University. He has studied poetry under Dr. Tony Medina at Howard University and Cornelius Eady at American University. He is a graduate of the Cave Canem and VONA Voices summer workshops. His work has appeared in such literary journals as The Little Patuxent Review, Colorlines, The This Mag, and Vinyl online. He was nominated fo...

Bill Cushing has lived in Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Florida, Maryland, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico before moving to California. As an undergrad, he was called the “blue collar” poet by classmates at the University of Central Florida because of his years serving in the Navy and later working as an electrician on oil tankers, naval vessels, and fishing boats before he retur...

J. P. Dancing Bear is editor for the Verse Daily and Dream Horse Press. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently, Cephalopodic (Glass Lyre Press, 2015. His most recent book, Fishing Singing Foxes came out in March of 2019 by Salmon Poetry. His next collection, Of Oracles and Monsters, which will be released by Glass Lyre Press in the fall of 2019. His work has appeared in...

Todd Cirillo is a writer, poet, publisher and pirate. He is one of the originators of After-Hour Poetry and co-founder and editor of Six Ft. Swells Press. His books include: Burning the Evidence (Epic Rites Press, 2017), Sucker’s Paradise, Sexy Devils, Still a Party, This Troubled Heart and ROXY and Three For the Road (which he co-authored) among others. Todd is widely known for his poetry perform...

Tzynya Pinchback is the author of the chapbook, How to Make Pink Confetti (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Poems and essays from her current manuscript, Tulle, have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Journal, the Aurorean, Mom Egg Review, Midnight & Indigo, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She writes about things at www.tzynyapinchback.com. The primary mission of Quintessential Listening...

Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, and the MacDowell Colony among others. Winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry, Manick was also awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. She is Founder and Curator of the reading series Soul Sister Revue; and her poem "Things I...

Jessica Lyew-Ayee Flynn started her life journey in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United States at the age of eight and has since lived in various cities across the country. Her poetry explores topics on mixed-race heritage, culture shock, and the challenges within interracial marriage and cross-cultural love. The primary mission of Quintessential Listening: Poetry is to provide a live format f...

Adam Shames is a poet, singer-songwriter, musician, storyteller and workshop leader whose collection of poems, Dreaming of Corners (http://kreativity.net/creative-vault), is available from Lulu Press (http://www.lulu.com/shop/adam-shames/dreaming-in-corners/paperback/product-23316909.html). He founded the Kreativity Network (http://kreativity.net) in San Francisco, where he first brought groups of...

Valeri Beers is from Bangor, Maine. Her first book of poems titled ...details... published by Thomas Hill Publishing. This is her second poetry book titled "Scratching The Surface", published by Underground Writer's Association.  She has been writing all her life and is inspired to write by listening to music and needing to remember things. Valeri has been published in a number of literary magazin...

Indran Amirthanayagam (www.indranmx.com) is an American poet and diplomat, He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published sixteen poetry collections thus far, including the just-released Coconuts on Mars (www.paperwall.in), En busca de posada (Editorial Apogeo, Lima, 2019) and Paolo 9 (Manofalsa, Lima, 2019).  The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press,...

Drew Kerr is a PhD student in anthropology. While he intends for his research to engage the anthropology of militarized zones, he utilizes poetry as a tool to reflect, digest, and present his own and interlocutors’ struggles living the realities of such spaces. Having lived in India during the formative years of his political and social orientations, Drew draws on revolutionary forms and themes of...

Jessica Philie Park is a founding member of the DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency (GPI) and co-hosts the GPI Open Mic (https://bossadc.com/events/dcgpi-open-mic-night) every second Tuesday of the month at Bossa in Adams Morgan. She has lived in DC for 24 years and works as a bookkeeper. She started writing in her teens and did her first open mic in her twenties. Her pieces are inspired by current eve...

Heather Corbally Bryant teaches in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. She has taught at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan, and Harvard College where she won awards for her teaching. She received her A.B. with honors in History and Literature from Harvard. She received her PhD in Literature from the University of Michigan. Her academic publications include, How Wi...

John MacDonald is a Maryland poet living in Silver Spring, near Washington, DC. He experiments in a variety of styles of poetry and poetry performance. His poems have appeared in various publications, including Gargoyle Magazine, Haiku Journal, Poetry Quarterly, and Dual Coast Magazine. Seven of his poems appear in Music of the Aztecs, an anthology featuring poets from the Washington, DC area. He...

"Once again, Ahmad Alkhatat uses his excellent writing talents to create sorrowful but beautiful images, this time as he visits the place of his birth, Baghdad, Iraq. The book begins with poems that describe his feelings about the visit and what he sees. “The Cost of Cigarettes,” “In A Random Street in Baghdad,” “Wounds From Iraq,” “At the Airport” and “Baghdad Taxi.” all denote images of the flav...

Unstoppable by Design is a play that explores the life of Matt Rifenburg who at times has been homeless, friendless, hungry, married to someone addicted to drugs,  a clueless father trying to raise his son, and a man losing his job and being diagnosed with a brain tumor in the same week.  Refusing to give up, he applies for a job at Cornell University. Will his determination to overcome be enough...

bes is the nom de guerre of a poetperformer, transdisciplinary researcher, conscientious creator and advocate for civil and human rights. Currently Washington, D.C.based, bes began collaborating with Art Is Dead (A.I.D.), an Istanbul-rooted “art and non-art formation” while living in Turkey in her early-mid twenties. Her poetry attempts to scrape the borderlands of memoir, activism, and antropoesí...