City of Asylum’s International Jazz Poetry Month welcomes artists from all over the world, bringing new friends sharing new works to the stage every year. This Jazz Poetry month we are delighted to welcome Milena Casado, an amazing Spanish composer, flugelhorn player, and trumpeter who is no stranger to mixing poetry with her compositions. Milena and her quartet will be sharing newly composed work, joined by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rae Armantrout, Palestinian poet Yahya Ashour, whose work has been translated and published in eight languages, current fellow at Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry & Poetics program Richard Hamilton, and Oleksandr Frazé-Frazénko, multi-disciplinary Ukrainian artist and City of Asylum writer-in-residence.

Each Jazz Poetry program begins with a 40-minute performance by the band, followed by 30 minutes of collaborative performance with the featured poets. In these collaborations, poets share their work while the musicians interpret and accompany their poetry with jazz, adding a unique, improvisational dimension to each performance.

Featured Musicians:

• Milena Casado: flugelhorn/trumpet
• JK Kim: drums
• Kanoa Mendenhall: bass
• Lex Korten: piano