5PM – 6PM
The event will be live (in person) and streamed on Instagram and Facebook.

SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) was co-founded by Jen Karetnick and Catherine Esposito Prescott. SWWIM publishes, promotes, and celebrates women writers, trans and cis women, nonbinary, intersex, and other gender-expansive communities, with a year-round reading series held at The Betsy-South Beach in Miami Beach, FL and the online poetry journal SWWIM Every Day. Together, SWWIM and The Betsy have presented almost 50 poetry readings.

Melissa Studdard is the author of two poetry collections, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, and Dear Selection Committee (forthcoming May 2022), as well as the chapbook Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings. Her work has been featured by places such as PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, SWWIM Daily, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. Her awards include The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Tom Howard Prize from Winning Writers, Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, the and REEL Poetry Festival Audience Choice Award. Like willful adolescents, Studdard’s poems sometimes venture off the page and out into the world on their own, where they’ve been made into banners, films, songs, car magnets, postcards, telepoem recordings, and more.

Melissa Studdard is a visiting writer in The Betsy Writers Room in partnership with SWWIM.