The COUPLET Reading Series is a quarterly poetry reading series, produced, curated and hosted by poet Leah Umansky since 2011. It features both emerging and established poets and is co-hosted by The Red Room, in the East Village of NYC. * Please note this building is not handicap-accessible as it is a historic building*
Our six readers include: Leslie Sainz, Timothy Donnelly, Maya C. Popa, Dante Di Stefano, Eugenia Leigh, Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Leslie Sainz is the author of Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023). The daughter of Cuban exiles, her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University, she is the managing editor of New England Review.
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including TIME Magazine, The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and the Best of the Net anthology. Eugenia serves as a Poetry Editor at The Adroit Journal and as the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary.
Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022) and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019). She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London. The Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly, she teaches at NYU and elsewhere.
Dante Di Stefano has published three previous poetry collections, including Ill Angels, and co-edited the anthology, Misrepresented People. A prize-winning author, he earned his PhD in English from Binghamton University and lives in Endwell, New York.
Timothy Donnelly’s most recent book, Chariot, was published in 2023 by Wave Books. His previous books include The Problem of the Many, winner of the inaugural Big Other Poetry Prize, and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his family.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips' fourth poetry collection, Silver, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March 2024. He is the poetry editor of The New Republic.