The Writer’s Center welcomes poet jason b. crawford for a reading from their new, award winning collection, YEET! jason is joined by poet Abi Pollokoff reading from her debut collection night myths • • before the body.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
jason b. crawford (They/He) born in Washington, DC, and raised in Lansing, MI, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published Fall 2025. They have been published in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and RHINO Poetry, among others. They are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.
Abi Pollokoff is the author of night myths • • before the body (Red Hen Press, 2025). A Pushcart-nominated poet, her poems can be found in TriQuarterly, The Pinch, The Seventh Wave, and Radar, where she was a finalist for the Coniston Prize. Abi was a 2024 AWP Writer to Writer mentee and has been supported by organizations such as the Jack Straw Cultural Center and Hugo House. The former events manager for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, she now serves as the managing editor for Poetry NW Editions and works in publishing. Find her at abipollokoff.com.
About the Books
night myths • • before the body: What are the stories we tell our bodies about our bodies? What are the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves? night myths • • before the body illuminates the dichotomies contemporary women grapple with every day: identity and expectation, self-preservation and doubt, freedom and entrapment, wildness and cultivation. By dissolving the boundaries between the body and the natural world, Abi Pollokoff’s evocative debut deconstructs the essence of womanhood, carrying the reader into a communing at once vulnerable and insistent. night myths • • before the body is a resounding interrogation of being human in a posthuman world.
YEET!: Following the traditions of Eve L. Ewing, Rio Cortez, and Douglas Kearney, jason b. crawford’s YEET! envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars. These poems ask what a free Black people would look like and how we might achieve such a thing. This collection presents a new take on Afrofuturism and utopianism. Rather than looking to a future of technological change, it steps years ahead to show how people are happier once they are no longer owned. These poems speak to racism, gun violence, colonization, global warming, flight, joy, friendship, and noise. This is a book about creating new worlds without the systems of supremacy that held down the old one.
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