Imago Foundation for the Arts (IFA) will host Poets Cynthia Bargar, author of Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room, and Jennifer Martelli, author of The Queen of Queens, as part of its Poets in Conversation series on Thursday, June 20 from 6:30 – 8 p.m. at Imago Gallery, 36 Market Street in Warren, RI.

The event will be facilitated by Vivian Eyre, a poet and IFA community member, with the goal of creating an informal dialogue between the featured poets and attendees. All are welcome to this free event.

The pair will read poems and discuss how their poems cross boundaries as they engage in conversation with each other and the audience and reveal how their work boldly enters the borders of family secrets, history, politics and the afterlife to make art.

Cynthia Bargar is the author of Sleeping in the Dead Girl’s Room (Lily Poetry Review Books), a Massachusetts Book Award 2023 Honors Poetry Book. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals including SWWIM Every Day, Driftwood Press, Nixes Mate, Rogue Agent, Book of Matches, Ocean State Review, and Sugar House Review. Cynthia is associate poetry editor at Pangyrus LitMag. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts. (www.cynthiabargar.com)

Jennifer Martelli has received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her latest collection, The Queen of Queens, won the Italian American Studies Association Book Award and was shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award. Jennifer Martelli is co-poetry editor for MER. In The Queen of Queens, the drugs, pop music, rocket crash, and Martelli’s “queens”–from Geraldine Ferraro to Madonna, Nancy Pelosi to Molly Ringwald–embody the struggle with and resistance against gender oppression, political sexism, and ongoing threats to reproductive rights, while reminding us of the power of one strong woman.

IFA is a non-profit organization run by artists for artists whose mission is to inspire creativity and promote art-making that enriches our communities.