Our first event of the 2016 CHAPTERS Reading Series kicked off with our keynote speaker, Tanwi Nandini Islam, newly published author of Bright Lines, multimedia artist, and creator of Hi Wildflower Botanica. Tanwi joined us at the General Society Library for an evening of mentee and mentor performances.
IN OUR WORDS
Read what Senior Program Coordinator Emily Yost had to say about our first reading series of our spring season!
Photos
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Girls Write Now Readers
Ashe Nervil, Humanity; Rosalyn Santana, We Just Wanna Go Up; Jane Liu, In A Tree; Mariama Loucoumbar & Susan Simonds, Bookworm, Her Way; Kizzy Nelson, Stronger Than I Was Younger; Yesmil Polanco, Now To America and the World; Amaya Gordon, Deer in Headlights; Jodi-Ann Fearon, The Unprecedented Destruction You & I; Kirby-Estarr Laguerre, Only God Knows; Sarane James & Margo Shickmanter, Perspective; Maryclare Chinedo, New Beginning; Brittney Nanton, how can an angel break my heart?; Kamilah Maxwell-Bowden, The Optimist and the Pessimist; Janny Huang, Crushed; Grace Han & Christina Tesoro, Mirror Mirror; Shakeva Griswould, Nappy
Emcees
- MISBAH AWAN is an 18 year old Pakistani American living in Queens, New York, and a senior at the Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria. Anxious with the world, always on her feet, and constantly moving, throughout her high school career Misbah has worked with several social justice organizations to uplift multigenerational, low-income communities in an effort to demand change. On the side, she writes her thoughts in several unfinished journals and finds doing house cleaning to be therapeutic. She hopes to remain a well-rounded, complex, and endearing individual who believes in people power and remains a rebel with a cause.
- THASFIA CHOWDHURY is a senior at Townsend Harris High School from Bangladesh, and when she craves the purest form of love, she goes back to the country of her ancestors. Her love for writing intertwines with her passion for activism, garnering a resistance that has led her to starting her own research on assimilation within the Bangladeshi diaspora, to creating her own non-profit organization for working class, high school girls in South Jamaica, Queens. In her free time, Thasfia skates, takes pictures of the sky, and reads books about freedom, intersectional feminism, and women who dare to be daring.