The Green Way Reading Series is a monthly literary event based in Takoma Park, MD curated by Simon Shieh and Takoma Park’s Poet Laureate Taylor Johnson. The series centers emerging and established poets and artists in interdisciplinary, intergenerational and cross-regional dialogues. We want these programs to encourage growing participation and local engagement in the evolving landscape of contemporary poetry.

Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She is a Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing programs. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors.

Vivek Narayanan’s most recent books of poems are After (New York Review Books / HarperCollins India, 2022) and The Kuruntokai and its Mirror (Hanuman Editions, 2024).  His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. He has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and at the New York Public Library and teaches in the MFA Poetry program at George Mason University.

Tahir Hamut Izgil  is a modernist Uyghur poet, filmmaker, and activist. He grew up in Kashgar, an ancient city in the southwest of the Uyghur homeland. After attending college in Beijing, he returned to the Uyghur region and emerged as a prominent film director. Izgil’s writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Atlantic and the New York Times, and has also been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and French. In 2017, as the Chinese government began the mass internment of the Uyghur people, Izgil fled with his family to the United States. His new book, “Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide” published in September, 2023. This book has translated over dozen languages and won 2023 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. In 2024, Izgil was awarded the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent. He lives near Washington, DC.

If you’d like to purchase the above titles online and still support People’s Book, follow the links below:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/white-blood-a-lyric-of-virginia-kiki-petrosino/8295529?ean=9781946448545

https://bookshop.org/p/books/after-vivek-narayanan/17222915?ean=9781681376462

https://bookshop.org/p/books/waiting-to-be-arrested-at-night-a-uyghur-poet-s-memoir-of-china-s-genocide-tahir-hamut-izgil/19015561?ean=9780593491799