Players Pub Spoken Word Series

Players Pub Spoken Word Series

Presented by Writers Guild at Bloomington

Featuring Ciara Miller (poetry) and Adam Henze (poetry)
Music by John Dehner

There will also be an open mic.

$5 cover (can be added to your tab).

CIARA DARNISE MILLER, a native of Chicago, holds both an MFA and MA in Poetry and African American/African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University. She also received her BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the co-founder of Bloomington, Indiana’s poetry slam series. She has published poems and academic essays in such collections and periodicals as Break Beat Poets, Mosaic, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, Fjords Review, African American Review, Callaloo, Muzzle, Toegood Poetry, Alice Walker: Critical Insights, PLUCK, Chorus, and Blackberry Magazine. She is the author of Silver Bullet, a chapbook of poems regarding early 20th century race films. She is currently the Community Schools Program Manager at Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corporation where she leads the W.K. Kellogg 2-generation educational/social justice program at Westcott elementary. She teaches poetry and drama classes to elementary through high school students throughout Chicago, and she is the founder of Miller’s Learning Center—an education company that assists clients with improving standardized test scores, grades, and writings.

ADAM HENZE is a doctoral student in the Literacy, Culture, and Language Education Department at Indiana University. His research interests include youth literacies,with an emphasis on spoken word and hip hop pedagogy, as well as juvenile justice, narrative inquiry, Disability Studies in Education, and participant action research. Adam is currently a graduate assistant in the Center on Education and Lifelong Learning in the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community. Adam is also a poet, organizer, and teaching artist, and has performed his work in England, Ireland, Canada, Puerto Rico, and in over thirty states in the US. His poetry has been featured on National Public Radio and in the Associated Press. Adam is the director of a summer academy for high school youth, a summer workshop series for incarcerated women, and currently serves as the vice president of Southern Fried Poetry, Inc.

LISA KWONG is an AppalAsian writer in the Midwest, where she currently teaches Asian American Studies and English at Indiana University. Her poems and creative nonfiction are forthcoming or have appeared in Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Best New Poets 2014, the minnesota review, Banango Street, Still: The Journal, Naugatuck River Review, Appalachian Heritage, Pluck!, The Sleuth, and other journals. She has received poetry scholarships and fellowships from Indiana University, The Frost Place, and Sundress Academy for the Arts, where she will be the Appalachian Writer-in-Residence this summer.