Mara Rosenbloom & Flyways ft. Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Roy Gúzman, & Toi Derricotte

As part of our fifteenth annual Jazz Poetry Festival, this will be an evening of jazz and poetry collaborations. Mara Rosenbloom & Flyways will be the featured jazz performers. Poets Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Roy Gúzman, Toi Derricotte, and Corrine Jasmine will perform.

Featured Musicians:

Mara Rosenbloom & Flyways: Pianist, composer, & bandleader Mara Rosenbloom has been called “a whole hearted poet of the piano,” – she is a builder & a synthesist; a fiercely lyrical composer & improviser (All About Jazz). Over the past decade, Rosenbloom’s intent to compose structures that foster connection & inspire creativity has made powerful group synergy a hallmark of her sound. The New York Times has praised Rosenbloom’s penchant for “full-bore group improvising,” while The Chicago Reader has noted that her trio “achieves an elusive chemistry and degree of spontaneous interaction that transcends mental boundaries.” Rosenbloom’s newest ensemble, Flyways, features 2019 Van Lier Fellowship winner Anaïs Maviel (voice & surdo drum) & in demand bassist Sean Conly. The group’s premier work, “I know what I dreamed” sets the text of one of Adrienne Rich’s 21 Love Poems to melody, and extends it into an exploratory set length work, balancing composed narrative within a dynamic level of improvisation. Adrienne Rich had a vision of a society where no human dominates another, and also a rich and complex awareness of what it means to inhabit, express, and sustain love; in expression of this work, the music flows from concentrated lyricism to the uninhibited sounds of the moment.

• Mara Rosenbloom (piano)
• Anaïs Maviel (voice & surdo drum)
• Sean Conly (bass)

Featured Poets:

Toi Derricotte‘s most recent book is The Undertaker’s Daughter (Pitt Poetry Series).  Her honors include the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and Poetry. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem in 1996. She serves on the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, U.S.A., and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México. Her first book The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015) won the PENAmerican/Joyce Osterweil Award, Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, NACCS Foco Book Prize, Utah Book Award, and was featured in Poets and Writers, LitHub, and the Los Angeles Times. Lima :: Limón, her second collection, from Copper Canyon Press was published in April 2019. Her poems have appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary magazines including Best American Poetry 2015, POETRY, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and more. Currently, she holds fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and CantoMundo. She is a Professor of Literature at Bennington College and a recipient of the 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Roy G. Guzmán is a Honduran poet whose first collection is coming out from Graywolf Press on May 5, 2020. Raised in Miami, Florida, Roy is the recipient of a 2019 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2017, they were named a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. They are also the recipient of a 2017 Minnesota State Arts Board Initiative grant and the 2016 Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Their work has been included in the Best New Poets 2017 anthology, guest-edited by Natalie Diaz, and Best of the Net 2017, guest-edited by Eduardo C. Corral.

Corrine Jasmin is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and writer currently based in Pittsburgh, PA. Much of her work focuses on light, often depicting all that’s radiant about the individual through social commentary. Her work can also float through and around womanhood. Alternatively, she shares cycles of healing and growth, fluidity, sexuality, death and rebirth, and the idea of femininity through text, film, video, performance, photography, and sculpture. Corrine works to explicitly bring a femme narrative forward and reclaim space and time. A central goal in her practice is to elevate Black joy, a narrative which goes underrepresented.