Voices from the Village Underground
Enjoy a taste of the West Village’s underground poetry and music scene with live performances from emerging female & gender expansive artists who perform at the Music Inn Open Mic Nights on West 4th St. Audience members will be encouraged to respond and participate in collaborative creative community by contributing to a collective poem which will be shared at the end of the night.
90 minutes
Multidisciplinary New York-based writer Alex Ford was born in St. Louis, MO on the longest day of the first year of the new millennium. At the University of Notre Dame, Ford received both a BA in Theology and English and the 2021 Richard T. Sullivan Award for Fiction Writing. Ford’s work has been featured in the 2023 One Page Poetry Anthology, NYU’s brio. Literary Magazine, and Notre Dame’s Re:Visions and Juggler publications. Ford’s work examines the interplay of phenomenology, myth, and metaphor in making meaning, especially concerning love, God, queerness, and the end of the world.
Clare Anella is 21 and goes by she/her pronouns. She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and has been in New York City for three years. She is majoring in literary studies and contemporary music at the New School. She instated the weekly poetry open mic at the Music Inn in the spring of 2023.
Mahiri Fainke is a West African traditional and diasporic dancer and musician from Philadelphia studying art, history, and culture for the past 17 years. As a keeper of tradition, Mahiri works to bring the culture to our youth, pass it forward, and keep their traditions alive. Also providing to the larger community to instill joy and healing to people!
Colin Cahill (they/them) is a poet from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They are currently a sophomore at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. They are pursuing a minor in Creative Writing, and their major is still tentative. Last year, their poem “South of Houston Street’s Tuneless Turmoil” received the Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poets Judith Lobel Arkin Poetry Prize. They primarily write poetry and dabble in prose. Their poetry explores very personal topics, such as mental health, loss, gender, romantic orientation, and sexual orientation, but they also write place-based poetry and ekphrastic poetry.
Collaborator Bios
Jaccoa Stills is a current student of Pace University for production design for the stage and screen. They’ve been writing for a few years but are new the New York as well as spoken word poetry, and are excited to share their work.
Zury Lowell is a nonbinary poet and filmmaker originally from South Salem, New York. They have a B.A. in filmmaking from Northwestern University and have also studied the Prague Film School in their narrative filmmaking program. As a committed anarchist, their work centers the radical and transformative power of care. Recent pieces of theirs have focused on themes of gender, grief, and environmental conversation. Their work has received recognition from Northwestern University, the New York International Film Awards, and the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences.
Thalia Tsai Renaker is currently a student at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York, studying painting and ceramics. Her work has been featured in Blue Space Gallery’s Passions exhibition, Pratt Institute’s Venice Summer 2023 exhibition, and Synchrony’s Flagship Exhibition. She works in the traditions of intuitive and surrealist art, and is continuously inspired by recurring patterns in nature like spirals and fractals, as well as the depths of the sea and space.