Janice Lowe & Pamela Sneed - October 30th, 2015

Friday Reading Series Janice A. Lowe, composer and poet, is a co-founder of the Dark Room Collective. Her collection, Leaving CLE poems of nomadic dispersal (Miami University Press) moves from Cleveland to NYC to Tuscaloosa’s “schoolhouse door” and back. She is also the author of the chapbook SWAM (Belladonna Series). Her poems have been published in Callaloo, American Poetry Review, In the Tradition and The Hat and appear on a digital album with Drew Gardner’s Poetics Orchestra. Her essays have appeared in Sing the Sun Up and The Cleveland Neighborhood Guidebook. She was a writer-in-residence with Melted Away’s The American Dream Project. A Jonathan Larson Dramatists Guild Fellow, she is the composer of 5 full-length musicals and well over 200 songs for theater/musical theater/opera, which have been performed extensively in New York City and regionally. Her love of setting all manner of text to music has resulted in collaborations with writers Tyehimba Jess, Nehassaiu deGannes, Jenni Lamb and others. As a pianist-vocalist, she has performed with The Jones Twins and with the experimental bands w/o a net, HAGL and Digital Diaspora. She teaches youth songwriting workshops and has taught Poetry and Performance at Purchase College and at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. She holds an MFA in Musical Theater Writing from NYU-Tisch School of the Arts. Pamela Sneed is a New York based poet and actress. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out, Bomb, VIBE, and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery (Henry Holt, 1998), KONG (Vintage Entity Press, 2009) and the chapbook Lincoln (2014). Her work is included in the 100 Best African American Poems edited by Nikki Giovanni, Best Monologues from Best American Short Plays 2013, and Ping Pong Magazine.