Forms & Features Community Reading

Poets from around the United States and beyond will share work they created in the Poetry Foundation's poetry workshop and discussion series, Forms & Features. Join us for a reading and celebration of their diverse voices, rich experiences, and powerful words.

Forms & Features is the Poetry Foundation’s series of free creative writing workshops for adults. To learn about current and upcoming offerings, including workshops created and led by Visiting Teaching Artists, please visit our Events page and sign up for our Events newsletter.

About the participating poets:

Dawn Angelicca Barcelona is a Chicago-based poet originally from New Jersey. Her debut chapbook, Roundtrip, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2025. Her honors include the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award (2022) and Epiphany Magazine's Fresh Voices Fellowship (2023). Her work has been published in Epiphany, Tampa Review, Red Ogre Review, Atlanta Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and BRINK. She's currently a candidate in the Litowitz MFA+MA Program at Northwestern University. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Writers' Conference, The Fulbright Program, Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, VONA, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

Annis Cassells is a poet, writer, and teacher whose work has appeared in print and online journals. Many of her poems began as she traversed the USA on her trusty Candy Apple Red motorcycle. Having retired her bike and helmet, she now attends writing and poetry workshops in far-away places over Zoom. In 2023 she published her second full-length poetry collection, What the Country Wrought.

Cyg is a rising senior in Stony Brook University's Creative Writing undergraduate program, where they specialize in fiction. When they aren't writing or procrastinating, they're hanging out with their elderly cat and best friend, Ruby. While poetry is not their primary medium, they appreciate the learning community that the Poetry Foundation's Forms and Features workshops provide, and are especially interested in exploring poetic intertextuality with pop culture.

Laura Daniels is a neurodivergent multi-genre writer. Founder of the Facebook blog The Fringe 999 and editor of The Fringe 999 Poetry Forum. Recently curated in One Art, Journal of New Jersey Poets, and Gyroscope Review. She facilitates a monthly writing workshop at Mary's Place by the Sea for women who have been touched by cancer. Her book, Gentle Grasp (Kelsay Books), is available on Amazon, in bookstores, and at local libraries. Her poems grow from a love of learning and New Jersey, where she lives with her partner in Mt Arlington and works in the community garden growing blueberries.

Susan Hohl is an artist-scholar-activist, feminist, and opera futurist who has written poetry, sung, and adored opera for as long as she can remember. She is especially drawn to the unique relationship between words and music, particularly in opera, a fascination that became the focus of her doctoral studies in comparative literature and musicology. She has worked as an educator, dramaturg, translator, and language coach, and is currently employed as a women’s health advocate in Chicago. An alumnus of the Guerilla Opera Libretto Lab, she has just completed her first full-length opera libretto.

Violeta Kalemi is an Albanian PhD fellow in Biotechnologies currently based in Italy. She writes scientific articles to make a living and poems to live a life. While she has not had her work published before, she has a few loyal readers out there who happen to be her closest friends.

Angelica Recierdo is the author of the chapbook One Last Ripe Life (Bottlecap Press, 2024). She was a finalist for both the 2024 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and the 2024 San Francisco Writers Foundation Writing Contest. Angelica is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Dominican University of California and is on the editorial board of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

Sayantani Roy is an Indian American writer who works out of the Seattle area. She has placed work in Alan Squire Publishing, Emerge Literary Journal, Gone Lawn, Grist (forthcoming), TIMBER, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2024 AWP fiction mentee and a semifinalist in the 2025 Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholars program. She reads poetry for Chestnut Review and Palette Poetry.

Lola Willis (she/her) lives and writes in Leesville, Louisiana with her husband and six children. She lost her transgendered daughter, Rain, to suicide in May 2024, which fuels her poetry and activism for suicide prevention, particularly in the LGBTQ+ community. Her poetry, short stories and parenting articles have appeared in both online and print publications including flashquake, The Danforth Review, and The Prairie Review. She published her first collection of work in 2024 entitled November Keepsakes.

Additional Information

• All Poetry Foundation events are completely free of charge and open to the public.
• Advanced registration is encouraged.
• The performance space is ADA-compliant and wheelchair-accessible.
• The program will feature CART captioning and ASL interpretation.

For more information about accessibility at the Poetry Foundation, please visit our Accessibility Guide.