The last of Khadijah Queen's curated COURTING RISK series featuring:

Bettina Judd
Anastacia Tolbert
Vanessa Angelica Villarreal

The event is on Friday, April 1 at 1980 N. Main, Los Angeles, CA from 6:30PM to 7:30PM. Doors open at 6PM.

More about the poets and where you can see thier work:

Vanessa Angelica Villarreal is a first generation American born to a guitar prodigy and an artist five miles from the US/Mexico border. Her work has appeared in Caketrain, DIAGRAM, The Western Humanities Review, NANO Fiction, The Colorado Review Online, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo 2015 Fellow and her book, Beast Meridian, was a finalist for the 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize. She currently lives and works in Boulder, Colorado. Her hometown is Houston, Texas.

Villarreal at The Feminist Wire: http://www.thefeministwire.com/2015/10/3-poems-by-vanessa-angelica-villarreal/

Anastacia Tolbert is a multifarious mix of grit, sunshine, alphabet juice & butterflies planted in Japan. She is a writer of poetry, prose, plays, and journalism. She wrote, co-produced and co-directed GOTBREAST?, a documentary about women and body image. Tolbert is a Cave Canem Fellow, Hedgebrook Alumna, EDGE Professional Writers Alum, and VONA Alum. Her poetry, prose and nonfiction has appeared in Women Writers in Bloom, Saltwater Quarterly, The Drunken Boat, The Poetry Breakfast, Women. Period, Essence and San Diego City Beat, as well as in the anthologies Cave Canem XI, Alehouse Journal, Things We Lost, Reverie, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees (nominated for the 2007 NAACP Award), Hair Piezes, and I Woke Up and Put My Crown On: 76 Voices of African American Women.

Anastacia on KUOW Radio
http://kuow.org/post/poet-anastacia-tolbert-what-tell-my-sons-after-trayvon-martin

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer. She is an alumna of Spelman College and the University of Maryland and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at the College of William and Mary. 

She has received fellowships from the Five Colleges, The Vermont Studio Center and the University of Maryland. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry. Her poems have appeared in Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies.

Most recently, her collection of poems titled Patient. won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a singer, she has been invited to perform for audiences in Vancouver, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Paris, New York, and Mumbai.

Bettina Judd at The Offing
http://theoffingmag.com/you-are-here/on-or-about-july-10-20151/

About the Curator:

Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Akashic Books 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011), and Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015). Her chapbooks are No Isla Encanta (2007) and bloodroot (2015), both from dancing girl press; Exercises in Painting, due out from Bloof Books in 2016; and the digital chapbook I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (Sibling Rivalry 2013), the full length version of which will be published in spring 2017 by YesYes Books.

Litmus Press published her Leslie Scalapino Award-winning verse play Non-Sequitur, which was staged at Theaterlab in NYC from December 10 - 20, 2015 by The Relationship. Reviews of her work can be found in Los Angeles Review, Spoon River Review, Open Letters Monthly, Mosaic, The Volta and other publications. Individual poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in Fence, Tin House, RHINO, jubilat, Tupelo Quarterly, Memoir, CURA, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Rattle, Aufgabe, The Volta Book of Poets, LitHub, The Force of What's Possible and widely elsewhere. She has performed at the Bowery Poetry Club, Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, Georgia Institute of Technology, Center for Book Arts (NYC) and other venues nationally. Since 2008, she has curated the annual multi-genre, multicultural, women/LGBTQIA-focused reading series Courting Risk, and currently serves as board chair for the feminist publisher Kore Press. She has joined the new Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University as core faculty.

Khadijah Queen at The Poetry Foundation
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/250144