A Poetry and Prose Reading with Iain Haley Pollock, Denne Michele Norris, and Bethany Ball (In-Person)

Iain Haley Pollock

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place (2018), and the forthcoming All the Possible Bodies (2025). Individual poems have been published in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times Magazine, and The Progressive. Pollock has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He serves as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY.

Denne Michele Norris

Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, VCCA, and the Kimbilio for Black Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA.

Denne’s debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, is forthcoming from Random House in April 2025. Her short story Last Rites appears in Everyday People: The Color of Life, an anthology published by Atria Books in 2018, and her story Daddy’s Boy appears in the 2019 anthology Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. Her fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her story Where Every Boy is Known and Loved was a finalist for the 2018 Best Small Fictions Prize. She is a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at The Kenyon Review Fiction Workshop.

She is the former Fiction Editor for both Apogee Journal and The Rumpus, and is co-host of the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot. She resides in Harlem.

Bethany Ball was born in Detroit and lives in New York. Her novel What To Do About the Solomons was published in 2017 by Grove Atlantic. It was short listed for the 2017 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a runner up in the Jewish Book Council’s debut fiction prize. Her second novel, The Pessimists, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2021.