Jazz Poetry 2025: Stephanie Chou Quintet, Jan Beatty, Olena Boryshpolets, Mubanga Kalimamukwento

The second week of City of Asylum’s annual Jazz Poetry festival introduces another jam-packed night of international poetry and musical performances from some of the world’s most talented artists. Each Jazz Poetry program begins with a full set from a live jazz band, followed by a collaboration with local and international poets. In these collaborations, poets share their work alongside the musicians, the two art forms melding to create that signature Jazz Poetry improvisational style that offers something exciting, new, and unique with each individual performance. 

New York City–based composer, saxophonist, and singer Stephanie Chou takes to the jazz poetry stage for the first time. Stephanie blends Chinese musical influences with Western jazz and pop to create a unique and vibrant musical world. Pairing with Stephanie and her quintet are renowned poets Jan Beatty, whose eighth book, Dragstripping, takes readers to dragstrip (in all its forms) where the ecstatic is rescripted; Olena Boryshpolets, a Ukrainian poet (and City of Asylum Writer-in-Residence) who recently released her moving and beloved collection Orpheus and Eurydice in New York; and Zambian writer and winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Prize Mubanga Kalimamukwento, who returns to Pittsburgh to share her debut poetry collection, Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies.

Featured Musicians:

Stephanie Chou: vocals, saxophone, compositions

Tomoko Omura: violin

Hyuna Park: piano

Ike Sturm: bass

Ronen Itzik: drums

About the Band:

Stephanie Chou is a composer, saxophonist, and singer based in New York City. Stephanie’s music creates immediate cross-cultural connections and focuses on connecting with the audience. Her debut album, Prime Knot, was an instrumental jazz sextet album featuring trumpeter Marcus Printup (Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra). Stephanie’s second album, Asymptote, focused on jazz reinventions of classic Chinese folk songs and features fresh takes on Chinese classics and a setting of one of Li Bai’s most famous poems. She has performed her music in Taipei, Beijing, Canada, and throughout New York City, DC, and more. Stephanie believes in the power of music to create social change. Comfort Girl, her 80-minute song cycle exploring the lives of Chinese “comfort women” abducted into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during WWII, is not only a groundbreaking fusion of East-West musical traditions but has also sparked public dialogue on a formerly taboo subject that still resonates globally for women today. DownBeat magazine called it “A stunning work that…shines light on a dark chapter of history.” Comfort Girl is currently being developed into an opera. Stephanie was a 2024 American Music Abroad US State Department tour finalist, a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship finalist, and a finalist in the iSING! 2020 Composition Competition (China).

About the Poets:

Jan Beatty‘s eighth book, Dragstripping, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in September 2024. She was featured in Poetry magazine in December 2024. Jan is the winner of the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard. Her sixth book, The Body Wars, was published in 2020 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Jan is at work on her ninth full-length book, a collection of essays about gender and censorship. Jan’s work has been published in the Atlantic, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, BuzzFeed, North American Review, and Best American Poetry. Her books include Red Sugar, finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize; Boneshaker, finalist for the Milton Kessler Award; and Mad River, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Of Jan’s work, Pitt Poetry Series Editor Ed Ochester said, “Nobody has a better sense of the colloquial American idiom. Nobody among her contemporaries writes better poems about urban working-class life.” Awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Discovery/The Nation Prize finalist, an Artist Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation, a Creative Achievement Award in Literature, Heinz Foundation, and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For 25 years, Jan hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR-affiliate WYEP-FM featuring the work of national writers. She worked as a waitress, a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, and in maximum-security prisons for many years. She was the managing editor of MadBooks, a small press that published a series of books and chapbooks by women writers. Jan has taught poetry for over 25 years at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Carlow University. She is Faculty Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed creative writing, the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops, and the international low-residency MFA program.

Olena Boryshpolets is originally from Odesa, Ukraine. They say you can leave Odesa, but Odesa will never leave you. Thus, Olena brought Odesa with her when she came to Pittsburgh and is ready to share this incredible city with all of us. Olena is a poet, writer, journalist, actress, cultural manager, and author of the short story book Ukrainian Detox and the book of poetry Orpheus and Eurydice in New York. Olena is also a member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, a co-founder of the public organization Creativity Without Borders, and a member of PEN America. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Olena traveled to Poland, where she spent a year acting in the Polish-Ukrainian play Life in Case of War. Since March 2023, she has been a Research Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and a Writer-in-Residence at the City of Asylum Fellowship for Ukrainian Writers.

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is the author of Shipikisha: A Novel (forthcoming from Dzanc Books, 2026), winner of the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her short story collection Obligations to the Wounded, and finalist for a 2025 Minnesota Book Award. Her debut poetry collection, Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies: Poems, is forthcoming from Wayfarer Books in 2025. Her creative work has also appeared in adda, Aster(ix), Isele Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Kweli, Overland, on Netflix, and elsewhere. Her editorial work can be found or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, the Water~Stone Review, Doek! Literary Magazine, and Safundi. She founded Ubwali Literary Magazine and co-founded the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop. When she’s not writing or editing, Mubanga serves as a Mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota (Twin-Cities), where she is also an Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) Scholar. Her research centers on the autoethnographic study of the lives of Zambian married women who are long-term survivors of HIV.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is open for dinner from 5–10 pm. Please visit Open Table or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.