Growing Up With Poetry: Chrysanthemum and Will Giles

🌱 growing up with poetry ~ poetry readings with Chrysanthemum & Will Giles 📝 04/24, 7pm-8:30pm Chrysanthemum @chrysanthemvm_ is a poet, a performance artist, and a public historian. She serves as a Co-Director of the Providence Poetry Slam, an enduring cultural staple housed at AS200 in downtown Providence, RI since 1992. She is the winner of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow from the Poetry Foundation, a Kundiman Fellow, and a recipient of Lambda Literary’s Justin Chin Memorial Scholarship. She broke ground as a finalist in the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam, and her teams were champions of the Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam and the first-ever FEM Slam. Her work appears or is forthcoming with the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, The Nation, Them, The Offing, and Button Poetry. William Nu’utupu Giles @heartwill (he/they) is an afakasi Samoan poet from Honolulu. They are an International Poetry Slam Champ and Kundiman Poetry Fellow. Will has taught creative writing throughout Oceania in Aotearoa, Papua New Guinea, and Guåhan. After receiving the First Wave scholarship, their collaborative theatre projects toured in New York City and Manchester, England. Will’s writing engages nature & pop culture to shade faces of colonization & diaspora. Will’s work has been featured on HBO, by The National Parks Service, and on NBC News.