This April 29, 2022, Bespoke Next Gen event will (we hope) be our first in-person event since 2019 and will feature four readers, including poet/writer Shayla Lawz, writer/comedian Nikki Palumbo, as well as poets Sahar Romani and poet Dan Schapiro plus a brief audience Q&A. The event will be FREE to the public both in person and live-streamed via the Bureau’s YouTube channel, and in the spirit of selecting an organization to fundraise on behalf of for every event, we will collect donations for our beloved host, the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, an organization and bookstore that celebrates and supports an abundance of queer artists and writers (including us).

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register.

Safety protocol (for those joining in person)

In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:

If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.

Readers:

SHAYLA LAWZ is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ. She works at the intersection of text, sound, and performance and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Jack Jones Literary Arts, The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), and The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden (DiSC). Her work appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Catapult, and The Poetry Project, among others. Her debut poetry collection speculation, n. was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She lives in BK and teaches in the Dept of Humanities & Media Studies at Pratt. @shaylalawz

NIKKI PALUMBO is a writer, comedian, and Italian based in Brooklyn. Nikki currently writes TikToks for Barbie (yes, that one) and American Girl. Previously, Nikki wrote on the inaugural MTV TV & Movie Awards: Unscripted, hosted by Nikki Glaser, and worked as a story producer on the YouTube Originals weekly music show, RELEASED. Nikki has contributed writing to The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, McSweeney’s, Reductress, and the Google Assistant. @nikkipal

SAHAR ROMANI is a poet and educator. Her poems appear with the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Yale Review, Los Angeles Review, The Believer, Guernica, The Poetry Society of America, Adroit Journal, The Offing, The Margins and elsewhere. She  received support from Millay Arts and Hedgebrook for writing residencies as well as fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Poets House, and New York University, where she earned an MFA. She currently teaches expository writing as a Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU. @saharromani

DAN SCHAPIRO is an HIV+ disabled poet and the author of a book of images and illness entitled HOLEPLAY (Nueoi Press, 2020). His work has appeared in LESTE, Bæst Journal, Verse Dot Press, FEELINGS, No Issue, Paintbucket, Protean Magazine, and elsewhere. His book has been recommended and reviewed in the likes of POZ Magazine and Full Stop Magazine.