Activating Student Voice Through Poetry

Facilitator: Natalie Capogrossi, Manager, School Marketing at Random House Children's Books

Mahogany L. Browne is a California-born, Brooklyn-based writer, educator, activist, mentor, and curator. She has published several books of poetry, and she is an Urban Word NYC Artistic Director (as seen on HBO's Brave New Voices), founder of Women Writers of Color Reading Room, and Director of BLM@Pratt Programming, and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. Mahogany's poetry picture books include Black Girl Magic and Woke Baby, and her young adult books include Chlorine Sky and Vinyl Moon.

Tina Cane grew up in downtown New York City during the 70s and 80s, surrounded by artists and writers and musicians, and she draws much of her creative inspiration from that era. The founder/ director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI, Tina also currently serves as the poet laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and three children, who are also a major source of inspiration.

Safia Elhillo is the author of the poetry collection The January Children, which received the the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Award. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she holds an MFA from The New School, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and listed in Forbes Africa's 2018 "30 Under 30." She was a 2019-2021 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her YA novel-in-verse Home is Not a Country was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.