Diya Abbas, Azura Mizan Tyabji, Zach Lesmeister

media release: Join undergraduate poets as they celebrate National Poetry Month with a reading and open mic on Saturday, April 22 at 7:00pm at Arts + Literature Laboratory. Free admission.

Three featured UW-Madison undergrad poets—Diya Abbas, Azura Mizan Tyabji, and Zach Lesmeister—will read their own original work followed by an open mic. You are invited to bring your own poem, song, or piece of fiction (3-5 min long) to share. This event has been organized by Salome Sookoo.

There will be copies of Azura’s Dear Azula, I Have a Crush on Danny Phantom (Button Poetry, 2021) on sale at the event.

Azura Tyabij is a poet and performer from Seattle, WA. She is the author of two collections, Stepwell (Poetry Northwest, 2018) and co-author of Dear Azula, I Have a Crush on Danny Phantom (Button Poetry, 2021). She was the 2018-19 Seattle and West Coast Youth Poet Laureate. Her work centers around womanhood, Black and South Asian identity, and radical futures. She is a 13th cohort First Wave scholar at UW-Madison.

Diya Abbas is a first-generation Pakistani poet. They were named the 2020 St.Louis Youth Poet Laureate and the 2022 George B. Hill Poetry Prize winner. Their work has been featured or forthcoming on The Offing, BAHR Mag, Illumination Journal, The American Library of Poetry, Button Poetry, and Respire Mag. Diya is currently studying Creative Writing and Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison through the First Wave program.

Zack Lesmeister is a mixed queer Vietnamese American poet from St. Louis. They are the 2017 Youth Poet Laureate of St. Louis. Zack is a recipient of the George B. Hill Poetry Prize, Charles M. Hart Jr. Writers of Promise Award, and the Phillip H. Wang Memorial Prize in Poetry. They are also a 2021 Semi-Finalist for the Pablo-Neruda Prize for Poetry as well as a Pushcart-Prize Nominee. Zack is a First Wave Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Creative Writing and will be beginning their MFA in poetry at ASU in the fall. Their work is published in The Offing, The Margins, Nimrod, and others.