A Poetry Reading with Rio Cortez, Z. Yasmin Waheed, & Romeo Oriogun

A Poetry Reading with Rio Cortez, Z. Yasmin Waheed, & Romeo Oriogun

Free | RSVP Here

Join us for an evening of poetry under the open sky at The Cleat Mia in No Name Harbor. Poets Rio Cortez, Z. Yasmin Waheed, and Romeo Oriogun will share their work in an intimate waterfront setting, bringing together works that inspire, challenge, and move us.

__

Rio Cortez is a poet and the New York Times bestselling author of picture books The ABCs of Black History, The River Is My Ocean, and The ABCs of Women's History. Her debut poetry collection, Golden Ax, was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and the Pen America Open Book Award.

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, she now lives, writes, and works in Harlem.

Z. Yasmin Waheed (2024-2025 Poetry Coalition Fellow) is a writer, translator, and artist who was born in Istanbul and raised in Miami. She graduated summa cum laude with a BA in English Literature from Florida International University, where she was named the 2021–2022 Butler Waugh Fellow in Literature and later worked at as a Center for Excellence in Writing lecturer. She has experience in book publishing and broadcast television by way of internships at Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and WLRN-TV. Yasmin was a part of O, Miami’s 2024 Greenhouse apprenticeship cohort and is passionate about bringing together her diverse skillset to platform and steward the unique stories that bloom in South Florida via creative events and compelling publications.

Romeo Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies, Nomad, and The Gathering of Bastards. A finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, he is the winner of the 2022 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize, the 2022 The Nigeria Prize for Literature, the 2023 Julie Suk Award, and the 2023 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Oriogun poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and others. He has also received fellowships and support from Harvard University, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Oregon Institute for Creative Research, the IIE-Artist Protection Fund, the University of Iowa, and Iowa State University. A juror for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, he currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University.