Six Poets Recite (Najya Williams, hms, Shada Harris, Breanna Reyes, Joanne Jagoda, Shannon Frost Greenstein)

Not the expected ghosts: Black leather jackets and lace up boots...

Excerpt from Clothes that Survived the Revolution

Najya A. Williams (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist who floats along the U.S. East Coast. She graduated from Harvard College, and is a 2025 M.D. and Narrative Medicine Program Graduate from the Lewis Katz School of Medicine (Temple University). Najya is devoted to the liberation and healing of all oppressed peoples, and this passion is reflected in many of her projects, service efforts and literary works. Her poetry, essays, and other writings have been accepted and/or published by a number of organizations, including POETRY Magazine, Black Youth Projectand Healing Points. Currently, she is also a Managing Editor for the Katz Journal of Medicine and Board of Director Member for Girls Health Ed, Inc. Looking ahead, Najya hopes to inspire full-body wellness across the world, one word and patient visit at a time.

Your own weight plus
your mother’s weight
plus your grandmother’s nail polish count
plus the size of your womb...

Excerpt from How to be a Woman Who Holds Things or How to Carry things

hms is a poet, actor, and hippie fun auntie, daughter, sister, tomboy, creative. She enjoys hikes in the woods, singing, and theatre. This is hms’s first publishing! She has pursued her acting career across the globe; performing in LA, Off Broadway in NY in 2022, then taught kids’ theatre in SF and more after school programs. Currently enrolled in her first poetry class at Berkeley City College, hms has been writing in journals since her pre-teen years, and hopes to continue to grow in the poetry community.

I’m tryna inspire my brothers to stop saggin and braggin bout what they packing. Dont you know your Inner-God packin while the Universe still tracking...

Excerpt from Focus

I am a Professional-Passionate seasoned dance choreographer. I strongly support and spread the awareness of Self-Love – which I also express through my poetry. I love bringing people together through my words and dancing.

My father’s name is Jamie, it’s Hebrew for Supplanter which means to take over someone 
which means to over power 
which is to say 
Maybe he never had a chance ...

Excerpt from Which Is To Say…

Breanna Reyes is a 26 year old Indigenous author. She has been published in a number of journals and anthologies. Breanna is currently writing full time and settling into motherhood. She lives in sunny central California with her husband, daughter, and various little animals. When not writing she can be found in nature, hiking, camping, and exploring with her family.

Sometimes when glorious spring arrives,
teeming with pink blossoms and frisky daffodils,
I think of her, my Oma, my namesake,
my sweet grandmother....

Excerpt from Silent Witness

After she retired, it took just one inspiring writing workshop to launch Joanne Jagoda of Oakland California on an unexpected creative writing trajectory. Her prize-winning poetry, creative non- fiction and short stories appear on-line and in more than sixty print anthologies including The Write Launch, Burningword Literary Journal, various Pure Slush publications, Snapdragon, Passager, Viewless Wings, Persimmon Tree Magazine, Better After 50, and Dreamers Magazine. She has received two Pushcart nominations, one recently, and first place in the Gemini Open poetry competition in 2022. Joanne’s book, My Runaway Hourglass, was published in summer of 2020 during the pandemic (Poetica Publications). Creative writing helped her get through her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Joanne continues taking poetry workshops and has taken a number of courses with the Writer’s Studio. She has also worked with several notable Bay Area poets. Joanne enjoys spoiling her seven grandchildren whenever she gets the chance.

Give me more wine, bloody 
like the stain of Fosse on Pippin’s hands. Give me Ben Vereen, 
sex made incarnate
singing of Charlemagne’s addiction to dopamine and 
glory....

Excerpt from Bacchanal

Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her children and soulmate. She is the author of “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novella forthcoming with Emerge Literary Journal. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, WAS Quarterly, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Shannon was recently a finalist for the 2023 Ohio State University Press Journal Non/Fiction Prize.