Hoboken Historical Museum hosts The Americans



(HOBOKEN, NJ) — The Hoboken Historical Museum and Poet-in-Residence Danny Shot will host The Americans – NJ Immigrant Poets. This literary event will take place on Sunday, December 3, 2023 at the Hoboken Historical Museum, located at 1301 Hudson Street. The event is free and open to the public. It will also be livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook @HobokenMuseum. Showtime is 4:00pm.

Drawing inspiration from Robert Frank’s iconic book of photographs The Americans (1958) we explore what it means to be immigrants in 21st Century United States. Four outstanding poets: Grisel Y. Acosta, Marina Careira, Mark Faunlaugi, and Megha Sood, all immigrants or first-generation Americans will share their experiences living in New Jersey. Fittingly, the first photo in The Americans is “Parade – Hoboken.” This event will be hosted by Poet in Residence Danny Shot, himself the child of immigrants.

The event is free and will also be livestreamed on the Hoboken Historical Museum’s YouTube page. Directions and a schedule of events are available at www.hobokenmuseum.org.

Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is the author of Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere (Get Fresh Books, 2021), a 2020 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. They are the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), which features over 30 Latina contributors, and she is the Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. Select work is in Platform Review; Best American Poetry; The Baffler; Acentos Review; Kweli Journal; Red Fez; Gathering of the Tribes Magazine; Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology; and The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry. Dr. Acosta was a panelist for NYFA, the Rasmusen Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the final award reader for the Fairfield Book Prize. Recent work includes oral history interviews of Latine/x folks from Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, funded by the Mellon Foundation/Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative at the City University of New York (CUNY), and forthcoming publication in an environmental ekphrastic anthology by Arts for the People/The Writing Lab. They are a full professor at CUNY-BCC, a Macondo fellow, a VONA alum, and a Dodge Foundation Poet.

Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer Luso-American poet artist from Newark, NJ. She is the author of Desgracada (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Tanto Tanto (Cavankerry Press, 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018), and I Sing To That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has exhibited her art at the Newark Museum, Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others.

Mark Faunlagui was born in the Philippines, grew up in New Jersey + New York, and went to Cornell University. He is an architect, and lives in Jersey City. His work has appeared in Fence, The Corduroy Mtn, The New Engagement, Assaracus, and Broken Lens Journal. On Some HispanoLuso Miniaturists, his first book of poems, was published by 1913 Press, and is the first installment in the projected Third World Lover Trilogy (02/Majnun and 03/Porn W/Out Sex). Mark’s work has oscillated between the minimalist to the baroque; from work in the Modernist vein of William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and Robert Lax, to recent experiments in traditional forms such as sonnets, ghazals, pantuns, and Skeltonics, or playing with Oulipian constraints. Though seemingly “apolitical,” the poems are always aware of the systems of power that allow – or constrain – our use of language.

Megha Sood is an Award-winning Asian-American Poet, Editor, and Literary Activist from New Jersey, USA. She is a Literary Partner with Life in Quarantine, at Stanford University. Her work has received support from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creating Writing, Kundiman, and The National League of Pen Women. She is a 2020 National Level Winner for the Poetry Matters Project and a Four-Time State Level Winner for the NAMI NJ Dara Axelrod Poetry Award. Her works have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of Net. Author of Chapbook My Body is Not an Apology (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and full length My Body Lives Like a Threat, (FlowerSongPress, 2022). Her widely anthologized poems, essays, and other works talk about her experience as a first-generation immigrant and woman of color. Her co-edited anthology and a few selected poems “The Medusa Project” have been selected as a digital payload to be sent to the moon in 2024 as part of the historical LunarCodex Project in collaboration with NASA/SpaceX.

The Hoboken Historical Museum (est. 1986) collects and displays artifacts in themed exhibitions on Hoboken history and offers educational programs, lectures, tours and hosts films and plays. We are a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

Recent exhibits have included a focus on Hoboken’s relationship with the Hudson River and its role as a sweets producer. Other exhibits included shipping history, an anniversary of the movie “On the Waterfront,” the city’s contributions to the world of music, and its struggle and revival through the 1970s. Our upper gallery space features six local artists’ work per year.

They are open six days a week in a 2,000-square-foot space in one of the oldest buildings on Hoboken’s waterfront, the former Bethlehem Steel machine shop, now known as the Shipyard.

The museum also publish books and walking-tour maps, as well as a series of oral history chapbooks documenting the diverse communities of Hoboken’s recent past. Each exhibit offers a tailored curriculum for local schools and groups of youngsters.