Poetry Reading: Morgan Parker & Becca Klaver

Morgan Parker is the author of the poetry collections Magical Negro, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night. Her debut YA novel Who Put This Song On? will be published in Fall 2019 from Delacorte Press, and her debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World/Random House. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets with Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles.

Becca Klaver is the author of two books of poetry—LA Liminal (Kore Press) and Empire Wasted (Bloof Books)—and several chapbooks. Her third book, Ready for the World, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2020. She was a founding editor of Switchback Books and is currently coediting, with Arielle Greenberg, the multimedia anthology Electric Gurlesque. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, Verse Daily, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. Becca is a graduate of the University of Southern California (BA), Columbia College Chicago (MFA) and Rutgers University (PhD), and is currently the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College in Iowa. Born and raised in Milwaukee, she lives in Iowa City.

This reading is part of a series of readings celebrating new poetry publications made possible with support from the Poetry Foundation.