Last summer, the Academy of American Poets continued its tradition of summer poetry readings by working with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to present Poetry from the Rooftops. This outdoor reading series was held on the newly renovated rooftop of the Arsenal Building in Central Park.

  Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

All events are FREE and open to the public. Seating is limited and attendees are encouraged to arrive by 6:15p.m.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poems, most recently Circle's Apprentice (Tupelo Press, 2011). He composed, with the poet Srikanth Reddy, the collaborative work Conversities (1913 Press, 2012), and has written two books of prose, A Whaler's Dictionary (2008) and Wonderful Investigations (2012) from Milkweed Editions. He has been a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency. He teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado State University.

Harmony Holiday was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BA from U.C. Berkeley, and her MFA from Columbia University. Her first book Negro League Baseball (2011) received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books. Her second volume, The Autobiography of Malik Flavors, is forthcoming in 2012. She lives in New York City.

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, MA, graduated from the University of Massachusetts (Boston), and moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. Snowflake / different streets, her new double volume of poems, was released in April 2012 from Wave Books. Myles has written more than a dozen volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She writes about writing, art and culture for a wide variety of publications including Artforum, Bookforum, and Parkett, and blogs on Art in America and for Poetry Foundation.

Monica Ferrell is the author of a collection of poems, Beasts for the Chase (Sarabande Books, 2008), which won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and a novel, The Answer Is Always Yes (Dial Press, 2008), which was named a Borders Original Voices Selection and one of Booklist's Top Ten Debut Novels of 2008. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Discovery/The Nation prize winner, she directs the creative writing program at Purchase College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Ariana Reines is the author of Coeur de Lion (2011), Mercury (2011), and the Alberta Prize winning, The Cow (2006), from Fence Books. She is also the author of TELEPHONE (2009), a play commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre in New York. She was Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at University of California, Berkeley in 2009. Her writing and performances have been featured at the Guggenheim, The Hammer Museum, The Swiss Institute, MoMA Print Studio, Bookforum, The Fader, Dazed+Confused, and Triple Canopy. Translations include works by Charles Baudelaire, Jean-Luc Hennig, Alain Badiou, and TIQQUN. She lives in New York.

John Yau is a poet, art critic and fiction writer. He is the author of many books of poetry including Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon, 2012) and Corpse and Mirror (Holt Rinehart, 1983), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by John Ashbery. Yau has received numerous awards including the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the American Poetry Review Jerome Shestack Award, and a 1988 New York Foundation for the Arts Award. He is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation. Yau has taught at several universities and was recently the arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail. He currently teaches art criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and resides in New York City.

Rain Venue: In the case of rain, readings will be moved inside the Arsenal Building.

Take the N, R, or Q to 5th Avenue or the F to Lexington Avenue /63rd Street.

Aracelis Girmay is the author of two books of poems, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), which received the Isabella Gardner Award, and Teeth (Curbstone Books, 2007), for which she received the GLCA New Writers Award. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book, Changing, Changing (George Braziller, 2005). Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow, teaches in Drew University's low-residency MFA program, and is an assistant professor of poetry at Hampshire College. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

A. Van Jordan is the author of three collections of poems: Quantum Lyrics (2009) and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005) from W.W. Norton & Co., and Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001). His fourth book, The Cineaste, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2013. Jordan's work has been honored with a number of awards including a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a United States Artists Williams Fellowship. He is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan, and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Tom Sleigh is the author of eight books of poetry, including Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011) and Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), which won the Kingsley Tufts Award. His honors include the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the John Updike Award and Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among many others. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Anselm Berrigan's books include Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights, 2009), Some Notes on Programming (Edge Books, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (2002), and Integrity & Dramatic Life (1999). He co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California Press, 2005) with Alice Notley, and Edmund Berrigan. Skasers, a petite book of poems sharing space with poems by John Coletti, is “winnowing its way into to the world” via Flowers & Cream Press. He lives in New York City.

Ish Klein is a poet and filmmaker. She is an alumna of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and her films have played at festivals around the world. Canarium Books published her first book, Union! in 2009 and her second book, Moving Day, in 2011. She lives in Amherst, MA.

D.A. Powell is the author of five collections of poetry, including Useless Landscape (Graywolf Press, 2012) and Chronic (2009), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His honors include the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Commonwealth Club, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Powell has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University, and served as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. He currently teaches at the University of San Francisco, and edits the online magazine Electronic Poetry Review.