Join us at 7pm on April 23 for the second stop on the Reprise 2025 Tour at Riffraff Bookstore + Bar!
Featured Poets
CHARLOTTE ABOTSI is a poet and arts administrator raised in Providence, Rhode Island. She studied media production and rhetoric and writing at Rhode Island College. Her work as a poet has been featured in HuffPost and Mic.com, and her poems have been published in Wax Nine journal and The Chicago Reader. Abotsi has received fellowships from the Pink Door Writing Retreat, the Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, Tin House, DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, AIR Serenbe, Define American, and Undocupoets. She previously co-curated season two of the poetry-based web series Ours Poetica for The Poetry Foundation.
With deep roots in creative arts organizing, Abotsi has been a longtime volunteer, mentor, and teaching artist with the Providence Poetry Slam at AS220. She currently serves as the constituent engagement coordinator for the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism. In her administrative role, she facilitates the permitting process for public art and special events, collaborates with cultural heritage and arts organizations to support public programming, assists resource-seeking artists, and supports the department’s grant profiles. Abotsi also serves on the board of trustees for the Providence Public Library.
JUSTICE AMEER is a poet, organizer, and abolitionist based in Providence, RI whose work explores the experience of being a Black trans woman in an apocalyptic America. Xe is a Pink Door fellow, FEM Slam Champion, and two-time Providence Grand Slam Champion.
Xe is a co-writer & producer of the production ANTHEM. Xe has performed at various venues across the country. Justice believes art is a crucial tool for Black queer liberation.
Xyr poetry is a practice in becoming unapologetic and unafraid.
CHRYSANTHEMUM is a poet, performance artist, and public historian. She serves as Co-Director of the Providence Poetry Slam, one of the oldest slam venues in the US. She is the recipient of a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Kundiman Fellow, and a Lambda Literary 2023 Justin Chin Memorial Scholarship Fellow. In 2024, she was named the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for LGBTQ Writers in Schools’ first-ever LGBTQ+ Youth Poet Laureate Residency.She broke ground as a finalist in the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam, and her teams were champions of the Rustbelt Poetry Slam and the first FEM Slam. With Justice Ameer, she served as Artist-in-Residence at Williams College and staged the interdisciplinary show ANTHEM at the American Repertory Theater's OBERON. Through the support of a MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation, Chrysanthemum organized the Vanishing Point Writing Retreat to connect diasporic Asian poets through collaborative, peer-led instruction, modeled after Rachel McKibbens’ Pink Door Writing Retreat.Now calling Providence home, she was born to Vietnamese parents in Oklahoma City, where she came of age around the NW 39th Street gayborhood and Asian American enclave. Chrysanthemum is developing her debut collection of poems. Her writing appears in The Nation, Them, The Offing, The Rumpus, Button Poetry, among others.