Self-Care as Resistance: Ekphrastic Poetry Reading @ Epiphany Center for the Arts

KWABENA FOLI is a multidisciplinary artist born in Belgium but predominately raised in the South Side of Chicago. He is the author of ON GOD (Candor Arts), and learning rhythm (Flowered Concrete). Other publications include The Los Angles Review, Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, Salt Hill Journal and elsewhere. He is also a Chicago poetry slam champion, national poetry slam finalist, and selected by the Guild Literary Complex as 30 individuals whose careers represent the future of the literary arts in Chicago and beyond. His visual work has over 200 million shares, and residences include Ragdale, Banff Centre of Arts, Chicago HATCH, Elastic Arts, and Poetry Center of Chicago.

APRIL GIBSON is a poet, writer, and professor from the South Side of Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Rhino Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of The Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award among other honors. She teaches in the Department of English, Literature, and Speech at Malcolm X College. Her poetry collection The Span of a Small Forever was published by Amistad/HarperCollins in 2024. 

FAYLITA HICKS is a queer Afro-Latinx multidisciplinary artist, writer, hoodoo practitioner, and cultural strategist advocating for people directly impacted by the carceral system. An Art for Justice Fund grantee, voting member of the Recording Academy, and winner of the 2020 Sappho Poetry Award from Palette Poetry, they are the author of A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024) and HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Currently based in Chicago, they are working on their forthcoming memoir about their pretrial incarceration, A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2026), their next contemporary jazz-infused spoken word album, and a digitally immersive performance piece tentatively entitled The Echoes.

JENNIFER KARMIN has published, performed, exhibited, taught, and experimented with language across the U.S., Cuba, Japan, Kenya, and Europe.  As a founding curator of the Red Rover Series, she has often led ensembles of poets improvising together at festivals, artist-run spaces, and on city streets.  Widely published in anthologies and journals, her books include the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice and The Sexual Organs of the IRS a collaboration with Bernadette Mayer.  Since 2000 she has worked with immigrants and refugees at Truman College, using creative writing to support literacy.

SAM HERSCHEL WEIN is a lollygagging plum of a poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. They have an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee and were the recipient of a 2022 Pushcart Prize. They have published three chapbooks, most recently Butt Stuff Flower Bush with Porkbelly Press. He co-founded and edits Underblong. Recent poems can be found in the American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Shenandoah, among others. They can be found in the cheese aisle of most stores, in the middle of a hug, or editing poems at your local coffee shop.