Drew Pisarra's first book of sonnets Infinity Standing Up was released earlier this year to great acclaim from The Washington Post, The Washington Blade, and Gertrude magazine, among other publications. A previous recipient of grants/commissions from the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), and the Portland Art Museum, he has also proven to be an accomplished performer of his own work at such NYC venues as The Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place, and NYC's LGBT Community Center.

Additionally, Drew is one half of the poetry activation project Saint Flashlight (with Molly Gross), an organization that finds playful ways to get poetry into public places such as film-themed haiku on a movie marquee and a series of "lost dog"-style flyers that drove to a phone bank of recorded poems. These unconventional installations have surfaced at the O, Miami Poetry Festival, Free Verse: Charleston Poetry Festival, and NYC's Poets House.

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded its first literature grant for Drew to continue working on two projects: “Periodic Boyfriends” and “Poems for Fassbinder”.

A prolific writer, Pisarra will actually be working on two projects as a Café Royal Cultural Foundation award recipient. The first, tentatively entitled Periodic Boyfriends, is his new series of sonnets inspired by both the periodic table of elements and his own history of past relationships, be they longterm or last night. A companion piece of sorts to Infinity Standing Up (which charted a failed affair across three feverish years), this new poem cycle expands his wittily seriocomic ruminations on love by surveying not just a single romance but a lifetime of dalliances. Simultaneously to this endeavor, Pisarra will be putting the finishing touches on Poems for Fassbinder, his book of innovative verse inspired by the late, great German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

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