Poetry Summit
Kazim Ali, Robin Becker, and Soham Patel
Saturday, November 7, 2026
4:00pm, Red Cap Room
Our 2026 Poetry Summit honors three amazing literary artists, all from LGBTQ+ communities, who through rigorous poetic form and deep engagement with subject matter address mortality and grief, the capacity of compassion to emerge from the sometimes lonely islands of self, and the pressing need to bridge the divides that separate humans from their natural environment and their cultural underpinnings. Kazim Ali brings us The Man in 119, an exploration of absence that grapples with questions of place and faith in the wake of his mother’s passing, asking where we go when we leave this world: “earth or sky or memory only.” Robin Becker, widely considered the foremost feminist poet of her generation, joins us to celebrate Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, which collects five decades of essential and influential work on childhood, nature, art, sex, friendship, and loss. Soham Patel’s The Daughter Industry: A Hauntological Confession, Alternative History, Speculative Autopoetics in Three Acts with Seven Players is a prismatic meditation on survival, a choreopoem of resistance and queer desire that critiques narrow and punitive views of gender even as it evinces joy, play, dance, spirit, somatic and ekphrastic ways of knowing. Whether raw and candid or wildly surreal, these are poets driven to expand poetic discourse via connection.
About the Authors
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently a professor of Literature and Writing at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water.
Robin Becker is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Black Bear Inside Me and the Lambda Award winner All-American Girl. A four-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Becker is recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of the City University of New York, The William Steeple Davis Foundation, and the Massachusetts Artist Foundation. A liberal arts research professor emerita in English and women’s studies at Penn State, she lives in central Pennsylvania and southwestern New Hampshire.
Soham Patel is the author of The Daughter Industry (Nightboat, 2026), as well as all one in the end/water— (2022), ever really hear it (2018), winner of the Subito Prize, and to afar from afar (2018). They live in Blacksburg, Virginia where they teach at the MFA at Virginia Tech.