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A Find Your Story poetry reading
Join the Library for a special panel celebrating the life and work of DC poet Essex Hemphill. Four poets will examine the enduring impact of DC poet Essex Hemphill, by examining their favorites of his poems. Featuring: Gregory Adams, Regie Cabico, Michele Parkerson, and Dan Vera. Moderated by Kim Roberts Meikle.
Gregory Adams was a founding member of Station-to-Station, a groundbreaking collective of Black LGBTQ performance poets and writers of the 1980s, and was active in the ENIK Alley Coffeehouse. In 2021, he was on the five-member team to create the documentary Fierceness Served!: The ENIKAlley Coffeehouse. His poetry, essays, and articles have been published in Blacklight Magazine, Nethula Journal, Street Sense, and the Washington Post. He lives in DC, and is currently completing a degree at Johns Hopkins University.
Regie Cabico is the first Asian American Poet and openly Queer Poet to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and is a three-time National Poetry Slam Finalist. His work has appeared on TEDx Talk, HBO's Def Poetry Jam, NPR’s Snap Judgement. He is the recipient of a Writers Residency from La Maison Baldwin and The Asian Pacific Studies Artist-in-Residence at NYU. Awards include a New York Innovative Theater Award for his work on the New York Neo-Futurists production of Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. His collection of poetry, A Rabbit in Search of a Rolex was published in 2024 by Day Eight Press.
Michelle Parkerson is a writer, educator and award-winning filmmaker based in Washington, DC. Her work has screened at prestigious international festivals including The Sundance Film Festival, The Berlin Film Festival and AFI Fest. She has documented LGBTQ icon Audre Lorde, jazz innovator Betty Carter, acappella activists Sweet Honey in the Rock and legendary male impersonator, Storme’ DeLarverie. Michelle has served on the faculties of Northwestern University, Temple University, Howard University and University of Delaware as well as the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs Advisory Committee and the Board of Mary’s House for Older Adults, Inc.
Dan Vera is a writer, editor, watercolorist, and literary historian. The recipient of the Oscar Wilde Award for Poetry and the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, he’s co-editor of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute Books) and author of three books of poetry, Celestial Fire: Songs for a Love that Dares (Beothuk Books) Speaking Wiri Wiri (Red Hen Press) and The Space Between Our Danger and Delight (Beothuk Books). Vera’s work is featured by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and included in college and university curricula; various journals including Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly; and in anthologies including Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, The Traveler’s Made Mecum, and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South.
Kim Roberts Meikle is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Q&A for the End of the World, a collaboration with Michael Gushue (WordTech Editions, 2025), and two guidebooks, including The District’s Departed: A Guidebook to DC Cemeteries (Rivanna Books, forthcoming in Fall 2026). Meikle co-curates DC Pride Poem-a-Day each June, and co-directs the Pride Poetry Fellowship at the Arts Club of Washington.
AGE GROUP: | Seniors | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | LGBTQ Pride | Educational Program | Author Talk |
