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Celebrate Samyak Shertok's No Rhododendron, winner of the 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.
Hear readings poets Yalie Saweda Kamara (former Mindful Poetry Moments 2023 curator!), Rebecca Lindendenberg, and Preeti Parikh followed by a book signing and reading from Samyak Shertok. Enjoy conversation and refreshments after!
Take a Moment Studio will be selling and creating custom broadsides of Samyak's work during the event!
Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Winner of the 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Kamara’s debut full-length poetry collection is Besaydoo (Milkweed Editions, 2024). The 2022–2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, she is the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration and the author of the chapbooks A Brief Biography of My Name and When the Living Sing. Kamara is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University.
Preeti Parikh is an Indian-origin poet and essayist with a past background in medicine and a recent MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. A Kundiman Fellow and National Poetry Series Finalist, she is the recipient of a 2024 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for Poetry, a 2023 Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant Award, and a 2022 Millay Arts Residency. Her writing is published in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, The Margins, and other literary journals and anthologies. Preeti’s debut collection of poems, BLUE SELVAGE, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2026.
Rebecca Lindenberg is the author of Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible, The Logan Notebooks, winner of the 2015 Utah Book Award, and Love, an Index. She’s the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Excellence Award, an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. Her works appear in American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati where she is also Poetry Editor of the Cincinnati Review.
Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, and Best New Poets. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University.
With The Well, Samyak has collaborated with Mindful Poetry Moments, where most recently his poem "A Blessing" inspired a section of Mindful Poetry Moments 2024.
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