We’re back at the 2025 Portland Book Festival this week, with poets m. mick powell and Taylor Byas, and moderater Jae Nichelle.

Taylor Byas’s second collection, Resting Bitch Face, uses watching and surveillance to explore Black female subjectivity. Byas engages with multiple art forms — painting, film, sculpture, and photographs – to explore the perspectives of artist and muse, of watcher and watched.

Taylor is in conversation with m. mick powell, whose debut poetry collection Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Stroy in Poems features of chorus of pop stars – Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and more – in an exploration of grief, sexuality, and celebrity. Powell refers to the collection as a documentary, and it includes imagery, speculative verse, and more.

Poet Jae Nichelle leads a conversation that starts from the prompt “pop culture poetry.” Engaging with pop culture, as these collections do, is an act of engaging with the cultural moment. Done well, it doesn’t “date” the work, but creates a time capsule – a documentary. Both collections are deeply researched, and Taylor and mick discuss their relationships to art, scholarship, and commerce, and the interplay between those different aspects of publishing this particular collections.

In the conversation, first we’ll hear m. mick powell read the title poem of their debut collection, Dead Girl Cameo, followed by a reading by Taylor Byas of the title poem of Resting Bitch Face and then a conversation between mick, Taylor, and the moderator, Jae.

A heads up – there’s some mature language that may not be appropriate for all listeners, and you’ll hear some bleeps in the opening poem.

Taylor Byas is an award-winning poet and a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times won the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Ohioana Book Award, the CHIRBy Award, and the BCALA Best Poetry Honor.

m mick powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, Aries, and the author of DEAD GIRL CAMEO (One World Books, 2025) and threesome in the last Toyota Celica & other circus tricks, winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize. An assistant professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.

Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle (she/her) is the author of God Themselves (Andrews McMeel, 2023) and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary) (YesYes Books, 2019). She was a finalist for a 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and won the inaugural John Lewis Writing Award in poetry from the Georgia Writers Association. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), the Washington Square Review, The Offing, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. She believes in all of our collective ability to contribute to radical change.

Taylor Byas & m mick powell in conversation with Jae Nichelle