Join us for a poetry reading in celebration of Togethering, the new collection from poet Rose Zinnia, at Hive Mind Books, 219 Irving Avenue, Bushwick.
Rose will be joined by imogen xtian smith, Lisa Hiton and jason b. crawford.
This event is free and open to the public. We strongly encourage masking and will have masks available for anyone who needs one.
Books will be available for purchase at Hive Mind Books the night of the event. We ask that all books signed at Hive Mind Books events be purchased from Hive Mind Books. If you already have the book(s) and would like to get them signed, we ask that you buy something else at the store while here, if it’s within your means. Thank you for supporting an independent queer bookstore!
ABOUT TOGETHERING
Veering consciously toward a greater collectivity, Togethering is a declaration to reach for each other and to let that sacred witnessing become the liferaft that carries us through the maelstrom of ongoing apocalypses. In a lyric essay embraced between poems, Rose Zinnia divinizes the coalition between loss and joy, queerness and the earth—the I, the we, and the us. Through encounters with strangers, herons, lovers, rivers, co-workers, family, the Internet, gingkos, Spirit, and a dental hygienist, she turns tenderly inward in order to expand more capaciously and lovingly outward, and in the process unwounds our living, lilts grief into grace. Togethering is the guide to noticing and then blossoming “the nests in which we are transformed to kin.”
ABOUT THE READERS
Rose Zinnia (she/they) is a poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, editor, and designer. She is the author of Togethering (Ledge Mule Press, 2024). Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, CV2, Black Warrior Review, Poem-A-Day, The Journal, New Ohio Review, Gulf Coast, Split This Rock, and West Branch, among others, and explores the confluence, undercommons, and hauntologies of disability, neurodivergence, queerness, transness, para-religious mysticism, and the earth. She works at the LGBTQ+ journal and press Foglifter and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
imogen xtian smith is a poet & transsexual. She wrote a book called “stemmy things” & has a new one, forthcoming in early 2026 (both from Nightboat Books). She is currently a student at Union Theological Seminary pursuing a MA R in Islamic Studies & Interreligious Engagement. imogen loves transsexuals & believes in a free Palestine.
Lisa Hiton is a poet and filmmaker living in Brooklyn, NY. Her first book of poems, Afterfeast, was selected by Mary Jo Bang to win the Dorset Prize and is available from Tupelo Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston University and an MEd in Arts in Education from Harvard University. She is the author of the chapbooks The Clearing (Black Lawrence Press) and Variation on Testimony (CutBank Literary). Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Linebreak, New South, NPR, and elsewhere. She is the founder and producer of Queer Poem-a-Day on the Deerfield Public Library Podcast.
jason b. crawford (They/He) born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published Fall 2025. They have been published in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, among others. The are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.