Celebrating LGBTQ+ Poets Then and Now

Join us on June 21, 2024, 7-9PM for Love Forever – Celebrating LGBTQ+ Poets Then and Now, featuring poetry readings by Alicia Mountain, a lesbian poet and a Teaching Assistant Professor at the Writer’s Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph’s University and Croatian-born poet and writer Ana Božičević, a recipient of the 40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism award from Feminist Press.

The evening will also feature a discussion by Long Island Poet Rusty Rose sharing her personal account of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, a series of spontaneous demonstrations against an early morning police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

An Open Mic will follow; we invite local poets to share one of their Pride-themed poems.

Alicia Mountain is the author of Four in Hand (BOA 2023). Her debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa 2018), won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. Mountain received her PhD at the University of Denver. She serves on the board of Foglifter, a LGBTQIA+ journal based in the Bay Area. Mountain lives in New York City, where she is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn and a psychoanalytic candidate at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies.

Ana Božičević is a poet and writer. She grew up in Zadar, Croatia before coming to the States. Her new book is New Life (Wave Books, 2023). She is also the author of Povratak lišća /Return of the Leaves, Selected Poems in Croatian (Hrvatsko Društvo Pisaca/Croatian Writers Society, 2020);  Joy of Missing Out (Birds, LLC, 2017); the Lambda Award-winning Rise in the Fall (Birds, LLC, 2013), and Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009). She received the 40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism award from Feminist Press, and the PEN American Center/NYSCA grant for translating It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire by Zvonko Karanović (Phoneme Media, 2015). The anthology of translations The Day Lady Gaga Died: An Anthology of Newer New York Poets (Peti Talas/Fifth Wave) she co-edited with Željko Mitić appeared in Fall 2011. Ana has a MFA in Poetry from Hunter College. At the PhD Program in English at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York she studied New American poetics and alternative art schools and communities, and edited lectures by Diane di Prima for Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Ana has read, taught & performed at Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Bowery Poetry Club, Brooklyn Poets, Harvard, Naropa, San Francisco State University Poetry Center, the Sorbonne, Third Man Records, University of Arizona Poetry Center, and The Watermill Center. Her poetry workshops explore image, performance, and the lyric. Ana is on the board of Ruth Stone Foundation and loves their work at the Ruth Stone House in Vermont — check it out.

“Championing the confessional voice with dynamic lyricism, Božičević offers sonorous texture, rollicking conceits, and unparalleled vision.” Publishers Weekly

Rita ‘Rusty’ Rose is a globally published poet/author and a beloved iconic LGBTQ+ civil rights activist. Presently, she serves as Poet Laureate of the Long Island LGBTQ+ Community (2018-2024) and has received  The Lesbian and Gay Achievement Award, for all her endeavors. The Suffolk County Legislature also recognizes her poetry and activism and have graced her with a Proclamation. At seventy-two years young she is 2024 Winner Best Poet of Long Island!