West of the Hudson Reading Series March 2025
New York Writers Workshop West of the Hudson Reading Series
Spring 2025 -- Saturday, March 15, 2025 / 6:00 PM
Megha Sood is an award-winning Asian-American author, poet, editor, and literary activist from New Jersey. Literary Partner with “Life in Quarantine”, at Stanford University. Her four poetry collections include the award-winning (My Body Lives Like a Threat, Flower Song Press, 2022), (My Body is Not an Apology, Finishing Line Press, 2021), and (Language of the Wound is Love, Flower Song Press, 2025). She has received support from VONA, Pen Women, Dodge Foundation, Kundiman, and Martha’s Vineyard Writing Institute. Her 900+ works have been featured in print, online journals, public exhibits, and anthologies including the Poetry Society of New York, MS Magazine, NYPL, Pen Magazine by American Pen Women, PBS American Portrait, NPR, WNYC Studio, etc, and numerous universities including Stanford University, Howard University, George Mason, CUNY, etc. Her poems and anthology “The Medusa Project” and other works have been selected to be sent to the moon in 2025 as part of the historical LunarCodex Project in collaboration with NASA/SpaceX. Find her at https://linktr.ee/meghasood
Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, author of twenty five poetry books, a former American diplomat, a translator, poetry host, and editor. He hails from Ceylon, an island now known as Sri Lanka. He grew up there, in London, and in Honolulu before going to Haverford College to play cricket and to learn peacemaking. He started writing poems taking after his father Guy Amirthanayagam and his granduncle Tambimuttu. He publishes poetry books at Beltway Editions (www.beltwayeditions.com), edits www.beltwaypoetry.com, is Indran1960 on Instagram, and runs The Poetry Channel on youtube. His newest books are Seer (Hanging Loose Press), The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powet Nan Po A (Poet of the Port) (MadHat Press), Musica subterranea (Kotter, Brazil).
Joanna Solfrian's 2009 collection, Visible Heavens, received the Wick First Book Poetry Prize, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye. Her second collection, The Mud Room, came out in 2020 from MadHat Press. In March of 2021, Finishing Line Press published a chapbook of ghazals called The Second Perfect Number. Beltway Editions published her third full-length collection, Temporary Beast, in 2024. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Harvard Review, Boulevard, Image, Spoon River Poetry Review, Margie, Rattapallax, The Southern Review, and Pleiades. Solfrian has taught writing at the University of Hartford and Southern CT State University, and has guest-lectured in various high school, undergraduate, and graduate creative writing programs. Currently, she lives and works in New York City.