First Wednesday Spoken Word Stage
OBSERVING NATIONAL HISPANIC HERITAGE MONTH
featuring
Shana Ritter, Zilia C. Balkansky-Sellés, Rosebud Ben-Oni
music TBA
TWO WAYS TO EXPERIENCE:
Email demand4poetry@gmail.com and we will send you the ZOOM link
OR
watch LIVE on the Writers Guild at Bloomington page
Sponsored in part by the Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Urban
Enterprise Association
A Pushcart Prize nominee, Shana Ritter has been awarded the Indiana Individual Artist Grant multiple times, and has taught poetry and writing workshops in various settings. Her short stories and poems have been published in journals and magazines that include Lilith, Fifth Wednesday, and Georgetown Review. While her mother’s journey as an immigrant in the early 1920’s provides the underlying narrative of her poetry chapbook, Stairs of Separation (Finishing Line Press, 2012), her novel, In the Time of Leaving (independently published, 2019), is a “story of exile and resilience,” set in 1492 during the Inquisition in Spain.
A poet, freelance writer, and occasional actor and dancer, Zilia C. Balkansky-Sellés is also the Extracurricular Coordinator and Academic Advisor at Hutton Honors College, Indiana University Bloomington, where she earned a PhD in Folklore Studies. Zilia has co-directed, written, acted in, and composed music for Monroe County Civic Theater productions, her most recent MCCT role being Miss Prism in the light comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest in a Pandemic, an online adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic.
A Latina-Jewish American poet and writer, Rosebud Ben-Oni won the 2019 Alice James Award for If This is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021). She was also awarded a 2021 City Arts Corps grant, and a poetry fellowship from The New York Foundation for the Arts in 2014, and from CantoMundo in 2013. Her two other poetry books are: Turn Around Brxght Xyxs (Get Fresh Books LLC, 2019) and Solecism (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013), and her poems have been published in journals and magazines that include POETRY, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Guernica, Frontier Poetry, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, and Waxwing. Her 20 Atomic Sonnets chapbook that was published online in Black Warrior Review (2020) is evolving into The Atomic Sonnets, a larger writing project that celebrates the periodic table’s 150th birthday. She currently lives in New York City, and teaches online poetry workshops for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.