Poetry at Bryant Park Reading Room

Chelsea Whitton is the author of Bear Trap (Dancing Girl Press, 2018) and Wonder Wheel, published by LSU Press in March of this year. She holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Poetry from The New School. Her poetry and prose have appeared in many of print and online publications, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Cream City Review, Poetry Ireland, The Atlanta Review, and Forklift-Ohio. Her work has been a finalist for the Gearhart Prize, and the Frost Place and Adrienne Richard awards for poetry. She is the recipient of the 2018 Sandy Crimmins National Poetry Prize. Raised in the Carolinas, she spent her twenties in New York and now lives in Southwestern Ohio, where she teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.Dilruba “Ruba” Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound. Her debut book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her work has also been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Halal If You Hear Me, New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims, They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets, and elsewhere. Ahmed received The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. In 2021, she joined the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.Matthew Yeager’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere, as well as numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2005, 2010, and 2024, The Strategic Poet, and Twenty Years of PoemoftheWeek.com. “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment,” his micro-budget short film, was an official selection at eleven film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up three awards. His “Poem to First Love” has appeared in online features in O, The Oprah Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Newsweek, Brides, and elsewhere. Other distinctions include the Barthelme Prize in short prose and multiple fellowships to both MacDowell and Yaddo. The co-curator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series from 2011-2017, Yeager’s first book, Like That (Forklift Books, 2016), received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. He teaches adjunct and lives in Cincinnati with his wife Chelsea Whitton and their twin sons Hank and Pete.Sahar Muradi is author of the collection OCTOBERS, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is author of the chapbooks [ G A T E S ], Ask Hafiz, and A Garden Beyond My Hand, and co-editor of two anthologies: One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature, and EMERGENC(Y): Writing Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War, An Anthology of Writing from Afghanistan and its Diaspora. Her writing has been supported by Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Bethany Arts Community, Blue Mountain Center, Kundiman, and Sustainable Arts Foundation. Sahar directs the arts education programs at City Lore and dearly believes in the bottom of the rice pot.