A 5×5 Reading Event* + Open Mic
This event was held at Moon Palace Books on Tuesday, July 2nd, at 7:00pm, and featured five fantastic writers (with Erin Sharkey stepping in for the sorely missed Kevin Reese), followed by an open mic, where several people stepped up to share.
Our featured writers this month were scheduled to be Zeke Caligiuri, Josina Manu Maltzman, Kevin Reese, Michael Torres, and A. E. Wynter. The reading and open mic were hosted by Erin Sharkey and Davi Gray.
Better Things is a series of events sponsored by the ReEntry Lab, in partnership with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW) and Moon Palace Books.
The ReEntry Lab is an organization working to connect writers and other artists leaving incarceration to a community that’s ready to receive them. You can learn more about its mission, volunteer to help, and sign up for the newsletter at reentrylab.org.
Zeke Caligiuri (he/they) is a writer and activist from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am (University of Minnesota Press), a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Caligiuri has won multiple awards through the PEN Prison Writing Contest and is the cofounder of the Stillwater Writers Collective, the first all-prisoner created and facilitated collective in the country. He is a contributor to The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison as well as School, Not Jail: How Educators Can Disrupt School Pushout and Mass Incarceration. He is an editor and contributor to the recent anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023). He is directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration and now does community outreach for the Minnesota Justice Research Center and is helping to build the Re-Enfranchised Coalition, empowering system-impacted people and reinvesting in the humanization of those still stuck within the captivity business.
Josina Manu Maltzman (all pronouns welcome) is a writer, carpenter, and rabble rouser who believes we all have a role to play in ending genocide and settler colonialism. For more about Josina’s writing and how it is informed by being in the trades for over twenty years and their organizing work as an antizionist Jew, visit www.josinamanumaltzman.com.
Kevin Reese (he/him) grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He spent 14 years incarcerated inside of the criminal legal system. During that time he founded the BRIDGE, which is a grassroots group of directly impacted criminal justice experts whose mission is to abolish mass incarceration and find the answers to a true transformative criminal legal overhaul. Kevin is the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director at Until We Are All Free Movement and the Founder and CEO of Until We Are All Free Consulting Group. He is a 2018 AWP intro Journals project award winner for poetry published in the Hayden Ferry Review.
Michael Torres (he/him) was born and brought up in Pomona, California where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020) was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series and named one of NPR’s Books We Love, 2020. Currently he’s an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com.
A. E. Wynter (she/her) is a Black writer from New York. She currently lives in Minneapolis, where she has curated multimedia art exhibits and organized various community events, including readings, open mics, and online writing workshops. Wynter has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and was a fiction fellow in the 2021-2022 Loft Mentor Series. Her in-progress novel Far Cry From A Woman was a finalist in the 2021 Miami Fellowship for Emerging Writers, and she received first place in the 53rd New Millennium Award for Poetry. Other poems have appeared in West Trade Review and Water~Stone Review. Most recently, Wynter was a 2023 resident at the Carolyn Moore Writers Residency.
Erin Sharkey (she/they) is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the editor of A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (Milkweed Editions ’23). Erin is a founding coop member of the Fields at Rootsprings, a retreat and respite space in central MN, and co-founder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt. She is the producer of film projects, including Small Business Revolution, which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Penumbra Theatre, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, Black Visions, Headwaters Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
Davi Gray (they/she) is a queer, trans, nonbinary poet, writer, storyteller, artist, activist, and abolitionist. They live in North Minneapolis (Bde Óta Othúŋwe), within Mni Sóta Makoce, unceded lands of the Dakota and Ojibwe. Gray has won prizes in PEN America Prison Writing Contests, and their work has been published in Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Rogue Agent, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere. They can often be found performing around the Twin Cities. You can learn more about their work, including upcoming events, at davigray.com.
* 5×5 format inspired by the 555 Reads series, developed by Elizabeth R. Tannen.