Start the week off with poetry! 

Join me for the first 2nd Sunday Reading of the year as I host Shiksha Dheda, Julia Guez, and Matthew E. Henry. It's going to be wonderful.

Shiksha Dheda is a South African of Indian descent. She uses writing to express her OCD and depression roller-coaster ventures, but mostly to avoid working on her master’s degree. Sometimes, she dabbles in photography, painting, and baking lopsided layered cakes. Her writing has been featured (on/forthcoming) in Wigleaf, Passages North, Brittle Paper, Door is a jar, and Epoch Press amongst others. She is the Pushcart-nominated author of Washed Away (Alien Buddha Press, 2021). She rambles annoyingly at Twitter: @ShikshaWrites. You can find (or ignore her) at https://shikshadheda.wixsite.com/writing

Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in the city of New York. The Certain Body is her second collection of poetry, written while she was recovering from COVID in the spring of 2020. For her poetry, fiction and translations, Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation as well as a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America, New York; she’s currently the senior managing director of design and implementation there. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers. You can find more of her work online at www.juliaguez.net and if you are so inclined, can buy all of her books directly from Four Way Books, Bookshop.Org or your local bookstore.

Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of the Colored page (Sundress Publications, 2022), Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag, 2020) and Dust & Ashes (Californios Press, 2020). He is EIC of The Weight Journal and an associate poetry editor at Pidgeonholes. MEH’s poetry appears in The Florida Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Shenandoah, and Solstice. MEH’s an educator who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. He writes about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground at www.MEHPoeting.com.