Freedom Dreams Open Mic & Festival Finale

1:00 pm PDT/  3pm CDT/ 4 pm EDT

On the most celebrated occasion in the world, independence from Britain, we come together to explore and share our dreams of freedom. The Freedom Festival creates a platform, a stage for people to speak, to say what we have to say in our world of pain, love and dreams. In this final Freedom Festival event, we invite you to the stage in this poetry open mic. Hosted by improvscience duo, Ashna Ali and Dr. Holmes. We’ll play with the poetry of life and word as we celebrate what are and have been able to create together.

Raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn, Ashna Ali is a queer and disabled child of the Bangladeshi diaspora, and the author of The Relativity of Living Well (Bone Bouquet, 2024) and the Substack, PAIN BABY. Their work is featured or forthcoming from The Margins, Indiana Review, Sun Dog Lit, and beyond. A Best-of-the-Net nominated poet, they are the poetry editor for Epiphany Magazine and co-editor of Dead End Zine with Hunter Hodkinson. With Divya Victor, they are the co-host of the poetry podcast The Source, produced by Asian American Writers Workshop. They hold a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and are earning their MFA in the low-residency Creative Writing program at Randolph College.

Sign up to read: Participants who want to read should log on during the first 10 mins of the event to sign up and be prepared to read a poem for no more than 3 mins.