DJcontraption AKA Dahron J (@dahron-anneliese.bsky.social)

The Adroit Journal | 2023 Djanikian Scholars Celebration (Issue Forty-Five Release) The editors of The Adroit Journal are thrilled to welcome you to a poetry reading celebrating the release of our forty-fifth issue! Readers will include: Major Jackson Erik Jonah Saba Keramati Willie Kinnard Emily Lawson Sarah Fathima Mohammed Kelan Nee Ashunda Norris Gabriel Ramirez * Major Jackson is the author of Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). He lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Major Jackson is host of podcast The Slowdown. Erik Jonah (they / them) has work published or forthcoming in Five Points, Ecotone, Foglifter, the Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. A nonbinary writer, they were a finalist for the 2018 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers and were recently awarded a residency at the Mineral School in Washington. Erik has taught in the Bronx, in Ohio, and at a school for runaway and homeless youth in Eugene, Oregon. Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. She holds degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from University of Michigan and UC Davis, where she was a Dean's Graduate Fellow for Creative Arts. Her work appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Margins, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for Sundog Lit. For more, please visit www.sabakeramati.com or follow her on Twitter @sabzi_k. Willie Lee Kinard III is a Black nonbinary poet, designer, educator & musician forged in Newberry, South Carolina & the author of Orders of Service (Alice James Books, 2023), winner of the 2022 Alice James Award. His musings include gospel surrealism, Black romance & superstition. With work appearing or forthcoming in Obsidian, Poem-a-Day, Best New Poets, The Rumpus & elsewhere, they are a Fellow of The Watering Hole & a Pushcart Prize nominee. Go see 'bout them at www.williekinard.com. Emily Lawson is a poet and PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of British Columbia. As a former Poe/Faulkner Fellow in poetry at the University of Virginia, she taught poetry and served as editor for Meridian. Her poems and lyric essays appear in Sixth Finch, Indiana Review, Waxwing, THRUSH, Muzzle, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Her pushcart-nominated fiction appears in BOOTH. She is a stage-III colon cancer survivor. Sarah Fathima Mohammed, daughter of Indian Muslim immigrants, is the 2021-22 National Student Poet of the West, the nation’s highest honor for youth poets, and the 2022-23 Vice Youth Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County. She has been honored for her poetry at the White House and has performed at PBS's Poetry in America, Carnegie Hall, and the San Francisco Opera House. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Cream City Review, Rattle, and wildness. She was born in 2005. Kelan Nee is a poet, educator, and carpenter from Boston, Massachusetts. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Houston. He is the winner of the 2023 Vassar Miller Prize for his manuscript Felling which is forthcoming from University of North Texas Press in 2024. His poems appear in POETRY, The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Ashunda Norris is a Black feminist multidisciplinary artist with creative work that encompasses film, poetry, archiving and her own theoretical frameworks. Her art is preoccupied with ancestral inheritance, spiritual traditions of the Black South, futuristic maroon expressions and fugitivity. A Cave Canem fellow, Ashunda’s art has been supported by the California Arts Council, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Community of Writers, Brooklyn Poets and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming Obsidian, Taint Taint Taint, Rootwork Journal, Fence, EcoTheo Review and other noteworthy literary publications. Born and raised in the heart of rural, red clay Georgia, the artist loves hot water cornbread, obscure cinema, star gazing, the ocean and celestial Sirius. Learn more at ashunda.com. Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx poet and teaching artist. Gabriel has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo, Miami Book Fair, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. You can find his work in publications like Muzzle, The Volta, Split This Rock, VINYL, Acentos Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly as well as Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017) What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019) and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020). Learn more about Gabriel @RamirezPoet and RamirezPoet.com. https://bit.ly/4mWy9OI