Reading held at The White Room on 138 Green Street.

Join us for a special evening as Worcester's Poet Laureate, Oliver de la Paz, reads from his latest poetry book "Diaspora Sonnets." Joining him will be Daniel Brock Johnson with a multimedia presentation of his latest poetry book "Shadow Act."

Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is forthcoming from Liveright Press in 2023. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the Artist’s Trust of Washington, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.

Daniel Brock Johnson is the author of "How to Catch a Falling Knife" published by Alice James Books. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, the City of Boston commissioned Johnson to draft lines of poetry for the twin memorials that stand near the finish line. Johnson’s poetry has been featured in outlets such as National Public Radio and PBS NewsHour and in a variety of publications including Tin House, Best American Poetry, and I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio. Johnson has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Poetry Center of Chicago, and elsewhere. For nearly a decade, Johnson served as the founding executive director of 826 Boston. Currently, he works as Mass Poetry’s executive director. Learn more at danielbrockjohnson.com.