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  • Date: March 8
  • Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm PT

Morgan Parker: There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé

Fred Wildlife Refuge | 21+ | free

screen-shot-2016-12-15-at-1-17-58-pmPoet Morgan Parker will read from her forthcoming collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017). Brooklyn-based writer Rebecca Schiff will open the evening with a reading from her devastatingly witty debut collection of stories, The Bed Moved (Knopf), and Hugo House poet-in-residence Anastacia-Renee emcees.

“What about modern womanhood isn’t explored in Morgan Parker’s poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé? The easy answer: nothing.

Filled with politics, pop culture, and personal poetry this collection challenges the status quo—critiquing the modern media, current politics, and the patriarchy, and challenging racism, sexism, and the ideas/products/entertainment we choose to consume both individually and as a society. Parker’s writing is soulful and in-your-face, and is exactly the best of what modern poets have to offer their readers.” —#1 in New Must-Read Collections by Poets of Color, Bustle

“There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé in these pages because, as Morgan Parker writes in poems channeling the president’s wife, the Venus Hottentot and multiple Beyoncés, ‘we’re everyone. We have ideas and vaginas, history and clothes and a mother.’ The kind of verve the late New York school Ted Berrigan would have called ‘feminine marvelous and tough’ is here, as well as the kind of vulnerability that fortifies genuine daring.” — Terrance Hayes

“So much soul. So much intelligence in how Parker folds in cultural references and the experiences of black womanhood. Every poem will get its hooks into you.” — Roxane Gay


Morgan Parker also teaches a poetry workshop, Poetry & Pop Culture, the afternoon before her event. For more information and to register, visit the class page.


headshot3-1Morgan Parker is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and anthologies, including Why I Am Not A Painter, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and Best American Poetry 2016. Winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize and a Cave Canem graduate fellow, Morgan lives in Brooklyn, New York. She works as an editor for Little A and Day One, moonlights as poetry editor of The Offing, and co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With poet and performer Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective.


Rebecca Schiff is the author of The Bed Moved, which is a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in n+1, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Guernica, Fence, The Guardian, and Lenny Letter. She has lived in Brooklyn since 2001, but will be moving to Oregon in April.