The 100,000 Poets for Change Readers & Performers

Joi Miner, 38, is a mother of two beautiful daughters from Montgomery, AL (currently residing in Birmingham, AL). She is a full-time author-preneur: editor, performance poet, storyteller, sexual assault and domestic violence activist, who loves spending time with her family, hosting shows, and listening to good music. You can listen to here readings online at Soundcloud and purchase her books and support her writing here.

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Tuscaloosa-based poet Joshua Baker is a Huntsville native and MSW graduate from Alabama A&M University. His passions lie in minority mental health and LGBTQIA+ advocacy. He has had the opportunity to feature at Out Loud HSV and perform at 100 Thousand Poets for Change Birmingham. He has had work published in Out Loud! HSV: A Year in Review (2016-2019), Aura Literary Arts Review, and Hypertrophic Press. Baker was a member of Out Loud HSV’s 2018 Poetry Slam Team and has led various poetry workshops rooted in harnessing the power that lies in our joy, our identity, and our immutable truth. Baker has also self-published two poetry chapbooks entitled This Here Side of Creation (2018) and Love Poems & Other Ways to Lose A Poetry Slam (2018). He lives. He loves. He tells stories. And on most days, that’s enough to foot the bill. You can support this poet by purchasing a book online.

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Emma Bolden is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2019 Literary Arts Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Seneca Review, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review.

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Desai Ogada is an active creator and theater artist in Birmingham. He is fluent in several languages, including English, Kiswahili,  and Dholuo (pronounced [d̪ólúô]) or Nilotic Kavirondo, a dialect of the Luo group of Nilotic tribe languages, spoken by about 4.2 million Luo people of Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan and Tanzania, who occupy parts of the eastern shore of Lake Victoria and areas to the south. The subjects of his writing often include theatre, poetry, and poly-culturalism. He is the co-founder of Lagnet, a theater company in Kenya, and was a feature poet for the Shelter in Magic Reading Series this past year.

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Laura Secord earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College. A Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared in The Birmingham Weekly, Arts and Understanding, The Southern Women’s Review, PoemMemoirStory, Passager, Indolent Books, Snapdragon, Voices of Resistance, Cahoodleloodling and Burning House Press. She is the director of Community Engagement for The Magic City Poetry Festival. She has a lifelong commitment to women and the under-represented. Her verse novel, An Art, a Craft, a Mystery is forthcoming from Livingston Press in 2021.

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María Esperanza Vargas is a Nicaraguan poet, narrator, and translator. She has a BA in English and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), an MA in Spanish and a PhD in Latin American Literature from the University of Alabama (UA). Her doctoral dissertation, “Transgression, Transformation, and Paradox in the Autobiography of the Lieutenant Nun” examines the fictional elements inherent to autobiographies and other cultural products. She has been an editor for the magazines Astarte and Poems, Memoirs, Stories, Hispania, and La Tatuana, an online literary journal of the University of Alabama. Her poems and stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Mujeres de sol y luna (Women of Sun and Moon, 2007), Voces de oro (Golden Voices, 2007), En las redes de la poesía (In poetry’s Nets, 2008), Poemas escogidos de la poesía nicaraguense actual (Selected Contemporary Poems from Nicaragua, 2008), Cuentos nicaraguenses de ayer y hoy (Nicaraguan Short Stories of Yesterday and Today, 2014), Hermanas de tinta (Ink’s Sisters, 2014), Voces de la resistencia (Voices of Resistance, 2017, poems in English published in Birmingam, Alabama), Voces del café (Voices of Coffee, 2018), and Résister, Anthologie de Poésie Latino-américaine (To Resist, an Anthology of Latin American Poetry/Sponsored by PEN International France, 2019). In 2009, María won Birmingham Southern College’s Hackney Award for poetry in English, and in 2003, her book, Los ojos abiertos del silencio (The Open Eyes of Silence) won the Rafaela Contreras Poetry Prize for Central American Women Writers. Email her at mariaembv@gmail.com. 

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Qadira Miner, better known as Mango, is an 18-year-old, spoken-word poet. She was published in the Guardian and The Atlantic before she graduated high school, and has had the opportunity to travel across the country to share her words and speak her mind. Now, as a college student, she wonders what the future holds for her and her art. She’s a rockstar in the making, confident in her own skin, and loves feeling the golden rays of the sun shining on her face in the summertime.

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Dr. Fen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Alabama. Their research – practical and theoretical – investigates the articulation of social and cultural norms, and how dance has the power to change and challenge our values. Their work has been published in Dance Chronicle, The Journal of Dance Education, The Activist History Review, and is forthcoming in Politics as Public Art: The Aesthetics of Organizing and Social Movements. Their choreography has most recently been seen on Alabama Repertory Dance Theatre, at C for Courtside Gallery, and in SHAPE Residency’s Virtual Exhibit. In pandemic-free times Kennedy also travels and teaches social partner dancing across the United States.

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Brianna Rhodes is a 2019 graduate of The Ohio State University with a degree in Dance. She was a former dancer Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, as well as a dance teacher for many dance studios and summer camps in Columbus. Everything she does comes with a creative point of view focused on the equality of any sex, race, sexuality, and profession. Her love thrives in Dance, African & African American history, activism. She recently utilizes the art of poetry to further her creativity towards activism.