If poetry is both a balm and a bomb, how can we create spaces of both healing and activation? Join poets Subhaga Crystal Bacon, Luther Hughes, and Cindy Veach for a conversation and reading surrounding how poetry can be a tool of resistance and protest as well as a haven in which to reflect, rejoice, and reconcile. Discover how poetry can be a space to learn from others’ experiences as well as enlarge our own understanding of what it means to be human in this modern age. Moderator Subhaga Crystal Bacon is the author of four poetry collections, including their most recent book Transitory, a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender non-conforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020. Luther Hughes is the founder of Shade Literary Arts. Their debut collection A Shiver in the Leaves wrestles with how a black gay man in Seattle finds refuge through love and desire. Cindy Veach is the co-poetry editor of MER (Mom Egg Review). Her most recent collection Her Kind is set in the Salem Witch trials and explores what happens when women reclaim their magic. Join us for this important conversation.