We’re so grateful to announce the publication of The First Nine Months, a poetry anthology from @room_project_’s Hybrid Poetics biweekly meetup facilitated by Liana Jahan Imam.

The First Nine Months features work from 11 poets in the Hybrid Poetics group and a beautiful cover by Lucy Cahill. The work as a whole is tender, brave, introspective, and at times incisively observant, spanning poetic forms, tied together with the golden thread of intentional community.

Hybrid Poetics is a biweekly meetup group, open to all genres of small work, particularly that which speaks across or troubles forms and identifiers. Meeting formats also rove freely from week to week; they might share their own work, discuss beloved published pieces, write together, or talk about their gardens. Hybrid Poetics endeavors first to be a safe, open, and generative space, interested in a no homework/no critique ethos.

Room Project is a space for femme and non-binary writers and artists to work individually and collaboratively. They aim to bolster an intersectional creative community in Detroit, creating an alliance of thinking, working peers in a context where support, safety, and focus can flourish. They are committed to accessibility, diversity, inclusion, feminism, and foregrounding the voices of women, trans, and gender non-conforming individuals.