Backyard Poetry Reading
We’re hosting another Backyard Poetry Reading at Hilltop Books! This is a free event. We will pass the hat for attendees to make an optional, small sliding-scale donation to support our invited poets: Marie Hinson, Katy Hawkins, and Mónica Gomery.
There are a few steps to enter the backyard. If there is inclement weather, the event will be moved indoors.
More about the poets:
Marie Hinson is a queer and trans artist raised in Appalachia, now practicing poetry, performance, and film in NYC. Her work has been included in commissions and programming at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tribeca Film Festival, Brooklyn Rail, Center for Book Arts, Bureau of General Services: Queer Division, Vox Populi, and the Scribe Video Center. Currently, she is a virtual reality cyberpunk goth building immersive performance environments in cyberspace as hexe.exe. Marie is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Please Remit My Qubits (Operating System, 2020). Her latest writing is a zine, I Don’t Want a Body Anymore, about online trans embodiment and community through the warp space of virtual reality. She is touring virtually and IRL with the noise and poetry performance Stretch the Grid Over My Skin.
Katy Hawkins PhD is a Philadelphia teacher of somatics (attention to the whole self). She is a lifelong Quaker, a sometimes Queer Theorist, and a teacher for the last 30 years. Since 2014 she has served as director of Shiné: Mind/Body/Spirit, housed by Chestnut Hill Friends, now a thriving community engaging ways to repair the cultural disconnect between thinking, feeling, and intuitive knowing. Katy’s classes and workshops hold sacred space for personal and collective transformation through somatic techniques from yoga, modern dance, neurobiological research, and solo spelunking into mystery. She has recently returned to literature professoring to teach what she calls “Moving Poetics,” inviting deep experiences of poetic language at the level of all three brains – head, heart, and gut. She will be reading from Thinking Feelingly: Somatic Approaches to Poetry, a collection of essays and embodied practices for experiencing poems carefully chosen for each week of the calendar year. She still believes in magic, ritual, and the capacity for play and connection to grow us. (Katy Hawkins’ photo credit: Justine Stehle)
Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi living on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, loss, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. She is the author of the poetry collection Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her second book, Might Kindred, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2022. Her poems have been awarded the Sappho Prize for Women Poets and the Minola Review Poetry Contest. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Four Way Review, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal, The Iowa Review, Poet Lore, and Poetry Northwest. Mónica serves on the clergy team at Kol Tzedek Synagogue, and teaches on the faculty of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. She is grateful to work with incredible teams of people on these projects committed to intergenerational healing and cultural, political, and spiritual transformation.