The Writer’s Center welcomes poet Amanda Shaw for a book launch celebration of her debut collection, It Will Have Been So Beautiful (Lily Poetry Review Books), with Sebastian Merrill, followed by a tribute to Sandra Beasley, featuring poets Rekha Mehra, Sunu P. Chandy, and Susan Okie.
Amanda Shaw is a poet, editor, and teacher who currently serves as book review editor at Lily Poetry Review. She has taught language and literature for over 25 years, including at the World Bank and other DC-area institutions. Although she’s lived in many different cities, states, and countries, DC has been her home for 12 years. Shaw’s poems probe language’s capacities in the hope that art might move us to a deeper commitment to life in all its forms. Her debut collection, It Will Have Been So Beautiful, implores us to consider what “home” means, particularly in the midst of an ever-worsening climate emergency. amandashawpoet.com
Sebastian Merrill’s debut collection GHOST :: SEEDS was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press and was selected by Ellen Doré Watson as the winner of the 2022 Levis Prize in Poetry from Friends of Writers. His work has appeared in The Common, Four Way Review, Diode Poetry Journal, wildness, and elsewhere. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House Workshop, and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. sebastianmerrill.com
Rekha Mehra is a poet and economist. Her economic work focused on the advancement of low-income women in developing countries. As a poet, she writes mainly about nature and the environment, growing up in India, and living in Washington, DC. Much of her formal training in creative writing occurred through classes at The Writer’s Center. She’s been published in Oberon and the HillRag. Her poem “Heirloom” was selected as a finalist in the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award for Poetry (2023) and long-listed for Fish Publishing’s Poetry Prize (2023). She is currently working on a collection of poems about loss of home and environment.
Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist including through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney. She is a queer woman of color, the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India, and lives in Washington, DC with her family. Sunu’s award-winning collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was published by Regal House in 2023. Sunu completed her MFA in poetry at Queens College, City University of New York, in 2013. Sunu is also currently a Senior Advisor with Democracy Forward, supporting work across teams including fighting the many attacks on racial equity, diversity, and inclusion. Sunu also serves on the board of the Transgender Law Center. Sunu is delighted to celebrate the publication of My Dear Comrades with all of you and with the book’s fabulous cover artist, Ragni Agarwal.
Susan Okie is a doctor, a poet, and a former Washington Post medical reporter and science editor. She received an MFA in Poetry from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in January, 2014. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, Passager, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Cider Press Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, and other magazines. Her chapbook manuscript, Let You Fly, was a finalist in Finishing Line Press’s 2017 New Women’s Voices competition, and was published in 2018. Her full-length manuscript, Woman at the Crossing, was chosen by poet Garrett Hongo as the winner of the 2023 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. Okie is a former clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Georgetown University Medical School, where she taught teach patient-interviewing and clinical ethics to medical students. For 17 years, she volunteered weekly at a local safety-net clinic, caring for uninsured adults in Montgomery County, M. She is married to Walter Weiss, a former medical school classmate. They live in Bethesda, Md., and have two grown sons.
Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections—Made to Explode, which won the Housatonic Book Award in poetry; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Theories of Falling, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize—as well as Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir and cultural history of food allergies. Honors for her work include the 2019 Munster Literature Centre’s John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, a 2015 NEA fellowship, and six DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships. She lives in Washington, D.C.