Every Sunday Coldfront features five upcoming cross-borough readings in NYC. Here are this week’s featured picks:

Thursday, August 9th, 2012 @ 6:30pm
Poetry from the Rooftops
The Arsenal Building at Central Park, 64th Street at 5th Avenue, New York, NY 

The Academy of American Poets continues its annual Poetry from the Rooftops free summer reading series atop the historic Arsenal Building in New York City’s Central Park. The Academy collaborates with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation each year to provide an intimate escape from the flow of traffic and offer New Yorkers the opportunity to hear a diverse group of contemporary poets read original work and “bare their brains to heaven.”

A. Van Jordan collections of poetry include Rise (2001), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005), andQuantum Lyrics (2007). Music, film, and history have influenced his work. The poems in M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A concern the life of MacNolia Cox, the first African American finalist in the National Spelling Competition in 1936. Quantum Lyricsdelves into physics, racism, history, and Albert Einstein’s work for human rights.

Aracelis Girmay, assistant professor of poetry, received her B.A. from Connecticut College and an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University. Her collage-based picture book, changing, changing, was published by George Braziller in 2005. Her first book of poems, Teeth, was published by
 Curbstone Press in 2007, and her second poetry collection, Kingdom Animalia, was published by BOA Editions in October, 2011.

Tom Sleigh was born in Mount Pleasant, Texas. He attended the California Institute of the Arts, Evergreen State College, and earned an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. His most recent collections include Space Walk(Houghton Mifflin, 2007), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Far Side of the Earth (2003), named an Honor Book by the Massachusetts Society for the Book.

Thursday, August 9th, 2012 @ 6-8pm
NYQ Reading Series - Crispi, Sklar, & Wong
Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 

Joanna Crispi graduated from Smith College and Harvard Law School. She has practiced law as a criminal defense attorney. Her novel, Roxanne and Alexander, about the wife of Alexander the Great, has been translated into German and Czech. She lives in New York City.

Pui Ying Wong is a native of Hong Kong and is bilingual in English and Chinese. She is the author of two chapbooks: Mementos (Finishing Line Press, 2007), Sonnet for a New Country (Pudding House Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Asian Pacific American Journal, Blue Fifth Review, Chiron Review, DMQ Review, 5 AM, New York Quarterly, andPoetz. Her poems in Chinese have appeared in China Press and New World Poetry. She has read her work on WBAI’s Talk Back, Writers on War and Peace, Hudson Valley Writers and at the Queens Library. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt. There is an interview with her at Southern Bookman. 

Friday, August 10th, 2012 @ 6:30-9pm
Orisha Poetry
Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 236 E. 3rd Street, New York, NY 

With artists:

Caridad De La Luz
John CHANCE Acevedo 
Iya Ibo Mandingo
Wilfredo BABA Borges 

Music by: Conjunto Oba Ire

Friday, August 10th, 2012 @ 7:30pm
Chapbook Release Party – Radioactive Moat Press
Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn NY

Pittsburgh’s Radioactive Moat Press is publishing 3 wonderful chapbooks: Ghostlines by Lucas De Lima, Crush Dream by Lonely Christopher, and IMMA by Ji Yoon Lee. To celebrate before Ji Yoon leaves NYC, all three poets are assembling at Brooklyn’s Unnameable Books to share work from their new chaps. Lucas De Lima is even flying out special from Minnesota for this, so it’s an event not to be missed!

hosted by MACGREGOR CARD!

Lucas de Lima has published poems and reviews in Action Yes, Mudfish, Raintaxi, and other journals. He is a contributor to the group blog Montevidayo, a translator of Brazilian poetry, and author of the forthcoming chapbook Ghostlines. With Feng Sun Chen, he is working on a poetics of the potato—a potatoesque—conceived as the mush of every human and nonhuman cheek.

Lonely Christopher is a poet, playwright, and filmmaker. He is the author of The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, published in Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series from Akashic Books (2011). Crush Dream is the second installment of a trilogy of poetry books titled The Death & Disaster Series; the first, Poems in June, was published in a limited edition by The Corresponding Society and the last, Challenger, is forthcoming. Christopher wrote and directed the feature length film MOM (Cavazos Films, 2012). He is also working on an Internet art project titled Pixelated Twinks. He lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Ji Yoon Lee wrote the forthcoming chapbook IMMA which she’s gonna read. Her poems and diary entries appeared in Karlie Kloss: a Literature Fashion Zine and Bambi Muse; and a series of poems is going to appear in Seven Corners soon. She received her MFA in poetry two days ago. woot woot.

MORE INFO: http://www.radioactivemoat.com/

Saturday, August 11th, 2012 @2-3pm
Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai Reading/Workshop
YMCA of Queens, 4207 Parsons Blvd, Queens, NY

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai is a Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based, Chinese Taiwanese American spoken word artist who has performed at over 450 venues worldwide including three seasons on “Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry.” Winner of an Urban Artist Initiative NYC Award, she was profiled on Idealist in NYC’s Top 40 New Yorkers Who Make Positive Social Change, AngryAsianMan.com’s “30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30,” and HBO’s “East of Main Street: Asians Aloud.” She has shared stages with Mos Def, KRS-One, Sonia Sanchez, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Amiri Baraka, Harry Belafonte, and many more. Photo by Katie Piper.

–Stephanie Ann Whited