Music and a Poetry Reading With Crystal Valentine and Jenny Xie This Saturday

The Poetry Center at PCCC in Paterson, NJ will present a reading by poets Crystal Valentine and Jenny Xie as part of the Distinguished Poets series on Saturday, March 4, 2023 at 1pm.

Crystal Valentine is a nationally and internationally acclaimed poet, activist, and educator. She is the author of Not Everything is a Eulogy (Penmanship Books, 2015). When she isn’t performing, Valentine can be found leading youth workshops at Harlem Children’s Zone and Urban Word NYC. She was the 2015 New York City Youth Poet Laureate, winner of the 2013 and 2015 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, 2nd place winner of the National Poetry Slam, and the 9th ranked poet by way of the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the Individual World Poetry Slam. Among her many honors, she was named Glamour Magazine’s 2016 College Woman of the Year, Teen Vogue’s Rising Young Black Thought Leader, and was the recipient of the National Conference of College Women Student Leaders Woman’s Distinction Award, and is a Callaloo Fellow. Crystal’s work has been featured on MSNBC and CNN and in the Huffington Post and other publications. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and MFA in Poetry at New York University, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Born and raised in the Bronx, Valentine now lives in Boston, MA.

Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and the PEN Open Book Award, recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University; and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf, 2022). Her work has appeared in Poetry, New York Times Magazine, and Tin House, among other publications. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Poets & Writers. She lives in New York.

Prior to the reading, enjoy music from Irish folk artists Brian Szura (uilleann pipes) and Charles Sporn (fiddle) in the Hamilton Club downstairs living room.