(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) -- State Theatre New Jersey’s Artist-in-Residence, nationally-acclaimed poet Glenis Redmond hosts a FREE online Community Poetry Reading during National Poetry Month on Wednesday, April 14 at 7:00pm via ZOOM. This special event is a celebration of our community, and the power of poetry to connect us all. The event will start with Glenis as she performs poetry from her 20+ year career. Later in the program, she will be joined by some of the people that she has guided and inspired to create their own personal poems.

Glenis Redmond travels nationally and internationally reading and teaching poetry so much that she has earned the title, Road Warrior Poet. She has posts as the Poet-in-Residence at The Peace Center for the Performing Arts in Greenville, South Carolina, and at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. During February 2016, at the request of U.S. State Department for their Speaker's Bureau, Glenis traveled to Muscat, Oman, to teach a series of poetry workshops and perform poetry for Black History Month.

In 2014-18, Glenis has served as the Mentor Poet for the National Student Poet's Program to prepare students to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at The White House. The students now read at the Library of Congress. 

Author and T&W Board member Tayari Jones selected Glenis Redmond’s essay, “Poetry as a Mirror,” as the runner-up for the 2018 Bechtel Prize. Teachers & Writers Collaborative awards the annual Bechtel Prize to the author of an essay that explores themes related to creative writing, arts education, and/or the imagination.  

Glenis is a Cave Canem Fellow, a North Carolina Literary Fellowship Recipient, and a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist. She also helped create the first Writer-in-Residence at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina. 

 Redmond’s “Dreams Speak: My Father’s Words” was chosen for third place for the North Carolina Literary Review’s James Applewhite Prize and “Sketch,” “Every One of My Names,” and “House: Another Kind of Field” will be published in NCLR in 2019. These poems are about —Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor of the underground railroad; Harriet Jacobs, who escaped from slavery and became an abolitionist, and the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Harriet E. Wilson, who was held as an indentured servant in the North and went on to become an important novelist, businesswoman, and religious speaker.

Glenis believes that poetry is a healer, and she can be found in the trenches across the world applying pressure to those in need, one poem at a time.  

Central New Jersey’s largest non-profit arts presenter, the historic State Theatre New Jersey is a magnificently renovated silent-film palace that flourishes today as a premier non-profit venue of the Northeast. The 1,850-seat theatre presents a diverse lineup. Each year over 200,000 people attend our world-class programming and over 35,000 children participate in our education programs each year

Built in 1921 and designed by renowned architect Thomas Lamb, the historic State Theatre thrived well into the 1960s. Transformed back into a handsome facility for live performance after a period of neglect, the venue reopened as a non-profit performing arts center in April 1988, and the press and public raved about its visual and acoustical splendors.

State Theatre New Jersey’s mission is to enrich the lives of people of diverse backgrounds across the region and to contribute to a vital urban environment by presenting the finest national and international performing artists; providing arts education to inform, inspire, and build future audiences; and providing a major performing arts venue in central New Jersey that encourages and enables members of the community to have a lifelong association with the performing arts.