Svetlana Kitto & Nicole Sealey - March 4th, 2016

Svetlana Kitto is a writer, teacher and oral historian. Her fiction, articles and interviews have been featured in Salon, VICE, Art21, Plenitude Magazine, OutHistory, Surface, Queen Mobs Teahouse and the New York Observer among other publications, and the books Occupy (Verso, 2012) and the Who, the What and the When (Chronicle, 2014). She has contributed oral histories to projects and exhibitions at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design and the gallery Know More Games. She co-curates the reading and performance series Adult Contemporary in NYC. Currently, she is at work on a novel called Purvs, which means “swamp” in Latvian, and is the name of that country’s first gay club. Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Her other honors include the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Third Coast and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation.