Join us for a reading with Angélique Jamail, who will be sharing work from her most recent poetry collection, The Sharp Edges of Water. Angélique will be joined by special guest Nia KB.

The Sharp Edges of Water is a book of stories as much as a collection of poems. In it, the characters swerve between the rain-drenched, tree-lined, concrete plains of Houston and the voluptuous, dynamic terrain of Los Angeles. They face multiple realities, and though they’re earnestly grounded, they sometimes swim in the waters of magic realism. Their story is both relatable and a little bit surreal.

Angélique Jamail’s poetry and essays have appeared in over two dozen anthologies and journals, including New Reader Magazine, Waxwing, Time-Slice, Improbable Worlds, Pluck Magazine, The Milk of Female Kindness––An Anthology of Honest Motherhood, Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston, Femmeliterate, Bayou City Magazine, and The Enchantment of the Ordinary. Her magic realism novella Finis. came out in 2014, and her poetry collection The Sharp Edges of Water came out this winter. Find her online at her blog Sappho’s Torque.

Nia KB (they/them) is a Black queer nonbinary poet, editor, and educator. They’ve received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Winter Tangerine, The Speakeasy Project, and UTSA’s African American Literatures and Cultures Institute. Their poetry appears in Rising Phoenix Review, Pamplemousse, Eleven40Seven, and elsewhere. When they’re not blessing stages or writing pages, they serve as Associate Poetry Editor for Fields Magazine, Production Assistant for the web series Gentrified, Curator/Host of the open mic/reading series Austin Interfaces, Creative Director for Austin Black Pride, and Teaching Artist for Austin Library Foundation’s Badgerdog Creative Writing Program.