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An evening of contemporary poetry bringing together three distinct yet intersecting voices, this reading gathers Eleni Sikelianos, Sandra Simonds, and Alexis Almeida. Across their practices, poetry becomes a site of formal experimentation and critical inquiry—engaging questions of ecology, translation, memory, and the entanglements of personal and collective histories. Moving fluidly between lyric and hybrid forms, their work reflects a shared investment in pushing the boundaries of genre while attending to the urgencies of the present.
POETS
Alexis Almeida is the author of Caetano (Ugly Duckling Presse 2026), and most recently the translator of Roberta Iannamico's Many Poems (The Song Cave, 2024). Her translation of Laura Fernández's There's a Monster in the Lake is forthcoming from Graywolf in the fall of 2026. She lives in New York and edits 18 Owls Press.
Sandra Simonds, an award-winning writer and professor, is the author of ten books. Sandra has taught at Thomas University, Bennington College, Florida State University, and the University of Montana. Much of her writing focuses on capitalism, class, ecology, and gender through avant-garde experiments with genre and form.
She is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Burning Oracle, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2026. She is also the author of Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022) which was a 2022 New York Times selection. Her awards include the University of Akron Poetry Prize for Further Problems with Pleasure chosen by Carmen Giménez and the Cleveland State University Open Poetry Prize for Mother Was a Tragic Girl. She has been a finalist for numerous awards, including the National Poetry Series. Her first novel, Assia (Noemi Press, 2023), based on the life of Assia Wevill, won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Fiction and was shortlisted for the Dzanc Fiction Prize. Her poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction have been published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and others. She was the recipient of the Reader’s Choice Award from the Academy of American Poets and is currently working on a book of experimental essays that are a hybrid of memoir, journalism, and literary criticism. Pieces from this manuscript are forthcoming in McSweeneys, Gulf Coast, the Seneca Review, and elsewhere. Sandra has also been granted residencies at The Arctic Circle Residency, Millay Arts Colony, the Story Villa in Finland, Vermont Studio Center, and Studio Faire in Southern France. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and English at UCLA, an M.F.A. at the University of Montana, and her Ph.D. (with honors) in Creative Writing at Florida State University.
Eleni Sikelianos—born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne'er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers—is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work.
Photo by Elizabeth Duffy, in one of Duffy's creations
She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. Memory Rehearsal, (forthcoming from City Lights) was named One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books for 2026, and is a genre-busting encounter between a poet and her ancestral past documenting a startling intersection of queer history, ancient theater, utopian visions, and modern poetry. Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction. She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence.