At Manor Mill Poetry Open Mic & Reading Series
Shirley J. Brewer (Baltimore MD) is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. She serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts & Technology. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems garnish Barrow Street, Passager, Gargoyle, Poetry East, Slant, Welter, among other journals and anthologies. Shirley's poetry books include A Little Breast Music (Passager Books), After Words (Apprentice House Press), and Bistro in Another Realm (Main Street Rag). Her fourth poetry collection, Wild Girls was published by Apprentice House Press in June, 2023. In 2026, Goddess of Swizzle debuted from Apprentice House. Shirley’s poems are part of the Lunar Codex program. They are currently on the moon! Website: shirleyjbrewer.com
Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist. After teaching for twenty years, she changed tracks and now works at an independent bookstore. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Epoch, American Literary Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. She has published two collections of poetry, Chaos Theories (2016) and Girls Like Us (2020). Her third collection, The Sky Will Hold, is forthcoming in March 2026. She lives in Baltimore with her family.
Eleanor Lewis is a poet and former co-editor of the Baltimore literary magazine, The Pearl. Uncollected Press published her chapbook, The Endless Undoing, in 2024.
Her poetry has been published in JMWW, The Light Ekphrastic, Maryland Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and Shattered Wig Review, among other publications. She is currently working on her next manuscript.
Rupert Wondolowski Rupert Wondolowski is the author of Dreams Are My Social Life (Publishing Genius), Mattress In an Alley, Raft Upon the Sea (Fell Swoop), The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit (Publishing Genius), and The Whispering of Ice Cubes (Shattered Wig Press). From 1988 to 2007 he edited the Shattered Wig Review literary arts zine and Shattered Wig Press, publishing 27 issues of the Review and close to 20 chapbooks by national authors, including many by cult author and artist Blaster Al Ackerman, on the Press. His poem “Tears Are Time Travel” recently was the “Pick of the Week” on the Best American Poetry website. Since 2013 he has performed in spectral folk adjacent The Mole Suit Choir with Liz Downing and, since 2020, Greg Hatem. They have recorded and released three albums, Campfire Spacesuit, Phantom Paddle Boat, and Doomsday Lamp. They set the poetry of Rupert and other Baltimore poets to music with guitar, bowed banjo, and electronics.
Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland. His work has appeared in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Sun and elsewhere. His first full-length book of poetry, Worth Burning, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026. Follow him on social media @MickiePoet or his website mickiekennedy.com.
Lady Brion is an international spoken word artist, activist, organizer and educator. Lady Brion currently serves as the executive director of the Black Arts District, an organization she founded in 2019. In 2024 she was appointed by Governor Wes Moore as the Poet Laureate of Maryland, making her the youngest Poet Laureate in Maryland’s history and the only spoken word artist to ever hold this position. She received her B.A. in Communication and Culture from Howard University and her MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Design from the University of Baltimore. During her slam career she has won the 2016 and 2021 National Poetry Slam, the 2017 and 2019 Southern Fried Regional Slam, and the 2019 Rustbelt Regional Slam. In 2021 she became the Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion making her the number one ranked woman slam poet in the world.
Hiram LarewDuring his career, Larew guided US Government food security programs. His seventh collection of poems, This Much Very, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2025. His poems have appeared in recent issues of Poetry South, Iowa Review, Poetry Scotland’s Gallus, and Contemporary American Voices, and have been nominated for four national Pushcart awards. He’s received support from Arts Councils and Food Banks as well as the United Nations and Feed the Children for his Poetry X Hunger, an initiative that is bringing a world of poets to the anti-hunger cause. And, he founded the Voices of Woodlawn, a powerful program of poetry, music and art that explores America’s tragic history and legacy of slavery. Larew is a Courtesy Faculty at five U. S. universities, is a former member of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Poetry Board and serves as the poetry consultant to WBJC-FM classical radio in Baltimore, Maryland. He lives in Maryland, USA. Websites: www.PoetryXHunger.com and www.HiramLarewPoetry.com
Unique Robinson is a poet/MC, professor, community educator, host, and proud Baltimore City native. She received her MFA in English/Creative Writing from Mills College, and a BA in Creative Writing/Black Studies from Hampshire College. Creatively, her work engages the power of language to transmute systemic harm. Professionally, Unique has a background in Community Organizing and national Reproductive Justice work, and is a lifelong artivist, with 20+ years of performance experience throughout the US and Havana, Cuba. Locally, Unique has worked as a Poetry Teaching Artist, and in administrative roles for various organizations, including DewMore Baltimore, LTYC, AFRO Charities, & The Lyric Baltimore. Unique received the Emerging Teaching Artist award from Arts Every Day in 2017, The Grit Fund Grant in 2019, and various other grants. She was the cover feature for Baltimore Magazine’s GameChangers in 2022. Unique is the Director of MICA’s MFA Community Arts Program, and the facilitator for The LightHouse, a FREE monthly writing workshop at Motor House for intergenerational communities. Unique has released three poetry collections: the chapbook, flicked/forgotten/FREED (2014), a full length book, Four Wings & A Prayer: A Charm City Churn (2019), and her most recent work, (not) in service, published with homie house press (2024). Unique has also released musical projects under the moniker of klefta*maniak, including vesica piscis EP (2019), Tha 27th Letter, Vol. I (2019) & II (2020), GETCHA LIFE! EP (2021), Cosmic Drama (2022), and Elevator Excursions (2023), which can be found on all streaming platforms.
Ned Balbo’s six books include The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Prize), 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Donald Justice Prize and the Poets’ Prize), and Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize). His awards include an NEA translation fellowship, four Maryland Arts Council grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. “The Wolves of Chernobyl” shared second prize in the UK’s 2022 Keats-Shelley competition and appears in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity U. Press). He has been a fellow or scholar at the Sewanee and Bread Loaf conferences, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where he was a 2021 Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow. He is married to poet and essayist Jane Satterfield. For more, visit https://nedbalbo.com for poems and https://nedsdemos.bandcamp.com for music.
Jane Satterfield’s newest poetry books are The Badass Brontës (a Diode Editions winner, 2023) and Apocalypse Mix (Autumn House Prize, 2017). Earlier books include Her Familiars (Elixir Press), Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press Poetry Award), and Shepherdess with an Automatic (Towson University Prize). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry from Bellingham Review, the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize, and more. Sections from Satterfield’s Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter Press) received Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize, the Faulkner Society/Pirate’s Alley Essay Award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. Satterfield has served on the faculty of the West Chester Poetry Conference and the Frost Farm Conference. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.
Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. She is the poet laureate of the City of Alexandria, Virginia, for 2022-25. Her publications include the full-length collection Some Things Never Leave You (2023) and the chapbook Bayna Bayna, In-Between(2021), in addition to poems in online magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. Since 2016, Zeina has served as a mentor for We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a writing program for youth in Gaza, and is currently the poetry editor for WANN. She also volunteers for Grassroots Alexandria, advocating locally for the civil rights of vulnerable communities. Zeina holds an M.A. in Arabic literature from Georgetown University. www.zeinaazzam.com
Cathy Hailey teaches in Johns Hopkins University’s online MA in Teaching Writing program. She serves as Northern Region Vice President of The Poetry Society of Virginia (PSV), co-hosts Virginia Voices, and organizes In the Company of Laureates. She administers the Student Contest and Young Poets in the Community Program for the PSV and the Jacklyn Potter Young Writers Competition for The Words Works. Cathy holds degrees from Duke University (A.B.) and George Mason University M.A. English/Writing & Editing). Her chapbook, I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth, was published by Finishing Line Press. Recent and forthcoming poem publications include Little Free Lit Mag, First Frost and Foto Specchio. Visit cathyhailey.com.
Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, editor, publisher, translator, youtube host and diplomat. For thirty years he worked for his adoptive country, the United States, on diplomatic assignments in Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America. Amirthanayagam produced a unique record in 2020 publishing three poetry collections written in three different languages. He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published twenty eight poetry books and translations. In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly; writes a blog; writes a weekly poem for Haiti en Marche and El Acento; has received fellowships from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture and the Macdowell Colony. He is the IFLAC Word Poeta Mundial 2022. Amirthanayagam hosts The Poetry Channel. New books include Seer, The Runner’s Almanac, and Powèt nan po la (Poet of the Port ) Indran publishes poetry books at Beltway Editions. Amirthanayagam’s first collection in Portuguese Música subterranea just appeared from Editora Kotter in Brazil.
Sunayna Pal's poetry graces the pages of numerous international journals, anthologies, museums, poetry festivals, textbooks, and libraries, resonating with readers worldwide. Her debut book, Refugees in Their Own Country (B&W Fountain), vividly narrates the Partition of India through evocative verse and illustrations, while her second book, Please Go to the Park (Bottlecap Press), is an invitation to embark on a journey of self-discovery. As the Director of The Poetry Academy, Sunayna nurtures a deep appreciation for poetry in others. She is dedicated to Heartfulness meditation. Residing in Maryland with her family, Sunayna invites readers to explore her work and journey at sunaynapal.com.
Nancy Murray is the author of the acclaimed memoir, One Child for Another; (11th Hour Press, 2015) as well as, No Experience Necessary, Stories from Life in the Works, (Wayword Books, 2024) and The Colors of Fear, A Collection of Poems. (Cyberwit Press, 2023) Her poetry, plays, and short stories have been published, produced, and performed locally and internationally. She teaches composition and creative writing at The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), and hosts, Words on the Thirds, a monthly poetry workshop at The Arts Lab of South County. She curated and edited the poetry and art collection, Liminal Spaces which was published in June, 2024, and she is a recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council creativity award for individual artists. Her website is https://www.nancymurray.net/
Dora Malech is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018),Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), and Trying × Trying (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2025). She recently co-edited The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, published by the University of Iowa Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker and Best American Poetry. She is on the faculty of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she is the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review, which recently won a Phoenix Award for Editorial and Design Achievement. She lives in Baltimore.
Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son, was named the Editors’ Selection for the 2022 Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press, 2024). His work appears in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, The Florida Review,RHINO, and The Southern Review. He lives in Baltimore, where he is an MFA candidate in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and is a managing editor for The Hopkins Review.
Jess Yuan is a poet, educator, and architect. She is the author of a poetry collection, Slow Render (Airlie 2024), and chapbook, Threshold Amnesia (Yemassee 2020). She has received support from Kundiman and Miami Writers Institute, and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Johns Hopkins. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, jubilat, and elsewhere.
Nancy Mitchell is a Pushcart Prize Winner and the author of three acclaimed collections of poetry: The Near Surround, Grief Hut, and The Out-of-Body Shop. Mitchell publishes widely and has been awarded numerous residency fellowships including two in Auvillar France. A featured guest at the Library of Congress’ The Poet and The Poem 2019 podcasts, she taught in the English and Environmental Studies Departments at Salisbury University and has worked extensively in community outreach. Poet Laureate of the City of Salisbury, Md, she hosts national and local poets at Poets’ Corner at City Headquarters in Salisbury. She is the Associate Editor for Special Features for Plume Poetry.
Beth Dulin’s writing has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review, Little Patuxent Review, New York Quarterly, and Wigleaf, among others. She’s the author of Truce, a limited edition artists’ book, in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. A graduate of The New School, she lives on the Eastern Shore of MD. Visit her online: https://www.bethdulin.com/
Richard Peabody, born in Washington, DC., raised in Bethesda, MD., and now living in Arlington, VA., is a poet, writer, editor, teacher, publisher. The author of a novella and three short story collections, he taught graduate fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University for 17 years. His Gargoyle Magazine (founded 1976) released issue 76 in August 2022. The magazine has since moved online. His most recent poetry volume, Guinness on the Quay, was published in Ireland (Salmon Poetry, 2019). The Richard Peabody Reader, a career-encompassing collection, was released in 2015 by Alan Squire Publishing.
Eric D. Goodman is author of seven books, including Faraway Tables (Yorkshire Publishing, 2024), Wrecks and Ruins (Loyola University’s Apprentice House Press, 2022), The Color of Jadeite (Apprentice House, 2020), Setting the Family Free (Apprentice House, 2019), Womb: a novel in utero (Merge Publishing, 2017), Tracks: A Novel in Stories (Atticus Books, 2011), and Flightless Goose (Writer's Lair, 2008) and more than 100 published travel stories, short stories and articles. He’s also co-founder and curator of the Lit and Art Reading Series, Baltimore’s longest-running literary salon, and BrickHouse Books, Maryland’s oldest independent press. You can learn more about Eric and his writing at www.EricDGoodman.com. Watch the trailer for Eric’s latest book, Faraway Tables, on YouTube.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.
Amuche The Poet is an active local writer, educator and teaching artist in the Washington, D.C metropolitan area. She is a first-generation born Black American whose poetry touches on the diaspora, sexual advocacy, mental health, and the female experience. Amuche has performed and featured at Towson University, Pentagon City Fashion Mall, the Show Place Arena and many other places in the DMV. Her poems were recently published in the Maryland Bards Anthology and the Mid-Atlantic Review. Amuche is a 2024 D.C. Poet Project Finalist. She is currently working on publishing her first collection of poetry. Through her writing she aspires to heal, grow and inspire people from all different walks of life.
Edward Doyle-GillespieEdward Doyle-Gillespie is a Baltimore poet and writer. He holds a BA in History from George Washington University, and a Master of Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins. He is the author of Gentrifying the Plague House (Apprentice Press), Aerial Act (Bold Venture Press), and several other collections of poetry.
He is an honorable mention winner of the Rhonda Gail Wiliford Human Rights Poetry Award. He won third place in the Westmoreland Arts and Heritage Literary Contest, and was the First Place Grand Prize Winner in the Kingsman Quarterly Iridescence Writing award.
Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections, Fruit, (University of Wisconsin Press, Spring 2020); Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press, 2013); and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He is co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). His poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, UTNE, and ZYZZYVA, among others. His awards include a 2023 NEA fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Jenny McKean Writer-in-Washington award, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry, the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry, as well residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Amy Clampitt House, the James Merrill House, VCCA, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Edward Doyle-Gillespie is a Baltimore poet and writer. He holds a BA in History from George Washington University, and a Master of Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins. He is the author of Gentrifying the Plague House (Apprentice Press), Aerial Act (Bold Venture Press), and several other collections of poetry. He is an honorable mention winner of the Rhonda Gail Wiliford Human Rights Poetry Award. He won third place in the Westmoreland Arts and Heritage Literary Contest, and was the First Place Grand Prize Winner in the Kingsman Quarterly Iridescence Writing award.
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, 2019 winner of The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and Haint, winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. In 2022 she received Maryland’s State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. In 2020 she received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize. She has been awarded fellowships and scholarships to Cave Canem, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, Hermitage Artist Retreat, and more. Her work has appeared in print, online, and in many journals and anthologies including: Harvard Review, PANK, Poetry Ireland Review, and Kenyon Review. She is on the board of directors for Cave Canem and on the boards of Poetry Daily and Lit Youngstown. She is the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series Curator and Poetry Programs Manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.
Hayes Davis’ first volume, Let Our Eyes Linger was published by Poetry Mutual Press. He is currently serving as the Howard County (Md) Poetry and Literature Society Writer in Residence, and he won a 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Regional Independent Artists Award. His writing has appeared most recently on the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature, and in This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets. His poems have also been published in New England Review, Poet Lore, Auburn Avenue, Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Fledgling Rag; he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016 and 2017. He is a member of Cave Canem's (Cah-vay Cah-nem) first cohort of fellows, a former Bread Loaf working scholar, and has attended or been awarded writing residencies at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Soul Mountain, and Manhattanville College. He has taught English and directed equity and justice work in Washington, D.C.-area independent schools for 20+ years, he lives in Silver Spring with his wife, poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis, and their children.
Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Small Craft Warning, a collaborative volume with artist Marcy Dunn Ramsey. Her previous collection, At the Narrows, was winner of the Delmarva Book Prize. She is the recipient of a Maryland Individual Artist Award, fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is currently the Sophie Kerr Poet-in-Residence at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
Tara A. Elliott’s poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Wildness, and One Art among others. An award-winning public school educator, she also serves as Executive Director of the Eastern Shore Writers Association (ESWA), chair of the annual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference, and host of the popular Thursdays with ESWA programming--free craft & generative workshops open to all writers every Thursday night on Zoom. She has been awarded numerous grants and honors for her writing and her volunteer work in community outreach. A former student of Lucille Clifton at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Tara is a recent winner of Maryland Arts Council’s Independent Artist Award for Literature. She has poems forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Cumberland River Review, and 32 Poems.
In his new collection, Dark Bird (Galileo Press 2024), Sam Schmidt offers poems that begin and end with an ordinary tree. From that minimalist center, the book travels in a widening trance to explore love, family, politics, philosophy, and old wounds. Acutely observant, ruefully funny, and consistently daring, Dark Bird speaks with a voice that feels both contemporary and evergreen. Schmidt is also the author of Suburban Myths (Beothuk Books 2012). For more than a decade he edited and published WordHouse, a newsletter for Maryland writers, and hosted the Baltimore reading series WordHouse at the Minás Gallery. His work has been published in such journals as Passager, Free State Review, and Gargoyle. He is a two-time recipient of the Maryland State Individual Artist Grant and has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from Johns Hopkins University. His wife Virginia Crawford, also a poet, is the author of questions for water (Apprentice House Press 2021). Schmidt lives and works in the Baltimore area.
Virginia Crawford has been a long-time teaching artist with the Maryland State Arts Council. She earned her BFA from Emerson College, Boston, and her Master of Letters from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Her books are Touch from Finishing Line Press and questions for water from Apprentice House Press. She currently teaches English Language Development at the elementary level with Baltimore County Public Schools.
Markus S. Sanders is a poet, actor, curator, abstract sculptor, and painter who has been active in the Baltimore arts community since the early 90’s. He has been a featured poet at The Martin Luther King Memorial Library, Frostberg State University, The Maryland Institute College of Art and the WHFS Festival as well as numerous literary events and venues. He was awarded an individual artist grant for poetry by the Maryland State Arts Council in 2000, and his prose has appeared in The Loch Raven Review, Art In Progress, The Pearl, The Shattered Wig Review and other literary journals and newspapers.
He has had lead and supporting roles in commercials, plays and independent films and is a former segment writer and director for the internationally syndicated, multiple Emmy and Telly award winning children’s educational program Aqua Kids.
His sculptures and paintings have been purchased by collectors across the United States and in countries as far flung as Australia. In 2016, he worked with the Overlea Community Association to create the Overlea ArtsFest, and has served as its curator and head juror since its inception.
Bruce A. Jacobs’ poems and essays have appeared in African-American Review, Free State Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Loch Raven Review, Seattle Review, Gargoyle, Poetry Kanto, Dickinson Review, and elsewhere. His rant Jeep Cherokee appeared in US Poet Laureate Billy
Collins’ anthology 180 More. His books include Race Manners, Speaking Through My Skin, and Cathode Ray Blues. He has appeared on NPR, C-SPAN, Pacifica, and mainstream outlets. He lives in Washington DC, where he is working on a memoir and a new collection of poems.
Jona Colson’s poetry collection, Said Through Glass, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. A full-length translated collection of poems by Uruguayan author Miguel Avero, Aguas/Waters, will be published this spring. He is also the co-editor of This Is What America Looks Like: Poetry and Fiction from D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (2021). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review and elsewhere. His translations and interviews can be found in Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Writer’s Chronicle. He became co-president with Caroline Bock of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House and edits the bi-weekly journal, WWPH Writes. He is a professor of ESL at Montgomery College and lives in Washington, D.C.
James Allen Hall (he/they) is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Romantic Comedy, selected for the Levis Prize by Diane Seuss and published in 2023 by Four Way Books. Their first book of poems, Now You're the Enemy, was published in 2008 by the University of Arkansas Press and won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Their second book, a collection of personal lyric essays titled I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Essay Collection Award and was published in 2017.
Hall is also the recipient of awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. With Aaron Smith, James is the co-host of the popular poetry show Breaking Form: A Podcast of Poetry & Culture. They currently serve as an associate professor at Washington College and direct the Rose O'Neill Literary House. They can be found online at https://www.jamesallenhall.com, on Instagram as @freedverses, or on Twitter and Facebook @jamesallenhall.
Photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
Lauren Russell is a poet and writer in hybrid forms. She is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award for “venturesome, interdisciplinary work,” and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Her next book, A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024 as part of the Multiverse series. Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, Millay Arts, Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, Foglifter, Gulf Coast, the anthology Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and lives in Baltimore with her cats, Cat Jeoffry and Lady Day.
Photo credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrisey
Lindsay Lusby’s debut poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019) won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from The University of Utah Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018) and Imago (dancing girl press, 2014), and the winner of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared most recently in Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Puerto del Sol, New South, and Gulf Coast. She is a Senior Poetry Reader for Cherry Tree and she edits poems at Tell Tell Poetry. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram at @lindsaylusby.
Susan Sonde is an award-winning poet who also paints and writes short stories. Her debut poetry collection, In the Longboats with Others, won the Capricorn Book Award and was published by New Rivers Press. Her most recent collection, The Arsonist, was released in 2019 from Main Street Rag. Her sixth collection, Evenings at the Table of an Intoxicant, was a finalist in the New Rivers New Voices 2019 contest. Her grants and awards include a National Endowment Award in poetry; grants in fiction and poetry from The Maryland State Arts Council; and The Gordon Barber Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America. Her collection The Chalk Line was a finalist in The National Poetry Series. Individual poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The North American Review, The Southern Humanities Review, The Mississippi Review, American Letters and Commentary, Bomb, New Letters, Southern Poetry Review, and many others.
Clarinda Harriss, a professor emerita of English at Towson University, is the longtime publisher of BrickHouse Books, Inc., MD's oldest literary press. Her most recent poetry collections are Air Travel, Mortmain, and Dirty Blue Voice. Harriss's poems and short fiction are widely anthologized. She directs BrickHouse Books, Maryland's oldest literary press. Her ongoing research interest is in prison writers. She and Moira Egan recently edited Hot Sonnets (Entasis Press, 2011), a collection of modern erotic sonnets. CityLit has established the Harriss Award for Poetry in her honor. Novelist Geoff Becker says that poems by Harriss "have the clarity of early light and the seductiveness of dreams."
Stephen left being a pastor after four decades to return to his first love, poetry. He recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore, studying with Steven Leyva. The poems in his first collection, Tin Ear, reflect his concerns as a 70-year-old with aging—in particular the experience of hearing loss and tinnitus. There are nine "Tin Ear Sonnets" on those themes. Other poems deal with gun violence, mature faith, and his mother's depression.
Stephen was born to missionary parents in Japan and spent most of his childhood in Tokyo. He went to high school in Nashville, then to Princeton University as an English major. He entered a Ph.D. program at Duke, but changed his mind, sensing a call to campus ministry. He returned to Princeton to the Theological Seminary and served in the University Chapel. He worked on four other campuses including Columbia, then was pastor of three churches over a period of 30 years.
His work has appeared in Passager and EcoTheo Review. In May he won First Prize in Maryland Public Television’s poetry contest and read the winning poem at Manor Mill in June.
Steven was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy's Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an assistant professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.
Kathy Mangan is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Above the Tree Line (Carnegie Mellon U. Press) and Taproot (Passager Books). Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Southern Review, Shenandoah, the Gettysburg Review, and the Pushcart Prize. She taught American Literature and Creative Writing for more than four decades at McDaniel College.
S.B. Merrow studied literature and Japanese, then apprenticed as a flute-maker. For years she worked with her hands and ears, crafting and restoring concert flutes for performers, collectors, and conservatories, before returning to her first love, poetry. Her chapbook, Unpacking the China, won QuillsEdge Press' 2016 competition. A full-length poetry collection, Everyone A Bell, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.
Kari Martindale is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and spoken word artist who has been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies. She sits on the board of the Maryland Writers Association and is co-editor of their journal, Pen in Hand. She has an M.A. in linguistics, manages EC Poetry and Prose, and values justice over peace. Much of her poetry focuses on social justice.
David Stant's poetry focuses on his experience of adversity and his journey toward a better life. His work has appeared in the 2020, 2022, and 2023 editions of Maryland Bards Poetry Review. David's poetry has been selected for inclusion in Train River Poetry Anthology Summer 2021 and Bards Against Hunger 10 Year Anniversary Anthology, two collections that include both nationally and internationally competitive writing. He has had published one short collection of work, titled Four Corners of Depression (J2B Publishing, 2021).
David Beaudouin, native to Baltimore, is a widely published poet and performer. He was the founder of Tropos Press, Inc. (1976-2001), one of the region's earliest and most respected alternative literary presses, as well as THE PEARL (1980-2001), a Baltimore journal of the literary and "spontaneous" arts. He served for more than a decade as a literary panelist for the Mayor's Committee on Arts and Culture and was instrumental in the creation of the Artscape Literary Arts Award, and additionally has created and hosted a number of public reading series in the area, most recently "Blabbermouth." Published works include Ten Poems (1973), Gig (1976), Catenae (1989), Ode to Stella (1990), American Night (1992), and Human Nature (1995).
David also has collaborated with visual artists Thea Osato and Julia Kim Smith on multimedia projects, and has co-produced two documentary shorts, Fluid Movement and One Nice Thing.
Alan Britt was nominated for the 2021 International Janus Pannonius Prize awarded by the Hungarian Centre of PEN International for excellence in poetry from any part of the world. Previous nominated recipients include Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bernstein and Yves Bonnefoy. Alan has published 25 books, his latest being The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Tavern of Lost Souls. He was interviewed at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem. A graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University he currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.
Raymond Cummings resides in Owings Mills, Maryland. A 1999 graduate of Washington College, he is the author of books including Crucial Sprawl and Whorl Without End. His writing has appeared in Pitchfork, The Wire, and The Village Voice. No Horizontal Tomorrow, a book-length poem, was published independently in 2022.elisionbebop@gmail.comVIGILANTE FLUXUS (2015) Whorl Without End: Poems (2020) No Horizontal Tomorrow: A Poem (2022)
Raymond Cummings resides in Owings Mills, Maryland. A 1999 graduate of Washington College, he is the author of books including Crucial Sprawl and Whorl Without End. His writing has appeared in Pitchfork, The Wire, and The Village Voice. No Horizontal Tomorrow, a book-length poem, was published independently in 2022.
Thom Hawkins is a writer and artist based in Maryland. He has written books soliciting anecdotes from people on a particular topic (In Name Only, A First Time for Anything, Alphabetical Orders, Musical Madeleines)—as well as children’s books (The Yeti Made Me Do It, Baldwin, Two Kings, Claudine), and has co-authored of several poetry books (Thirty Placebos; O, DeJoy; Slight Refreshments). thom.hawkins@gmail.comIn Name Only (2020)A First Time for Anything (2020) In Evidence (2021) Alphabetical Orders (2021) Musical Madeleines (2022)
Douglas William Garcia Mowbray lives in Harford County, Maryland with his wife, Nayeli; and son, Emerson. His work has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Welter, Urbanite, and Found Poetry Review. He has performed on stage for Mortified and the Interrobang Theatre Company in Baltimore, Maryland. Doug is Editor-at-Large for BrickHouse Books, and a former publisher, twentythreebooks.minorpoet@gmail.com
Cummings, Hawkins and Mowbray’s books together:Green Rune Anthology (2017)Thirty Placebos (2020) O, DeJoy (2021)Slight Refreshments (2022
Michael Fallon is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he taught expository writing, creative writing, and literature for 35 years. He has been President of the Maryland State Poetry and Literary Society and an editor of Puerto del Sol and was the founding editor of The Maryland Poetry Review. Poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Connecticut River Review, The Loch Raven Review, Illuminations, Southword, Slipstream, The Bangalore Review, and many other publications. Fallon is the winner of two Fellowships in Poetry from the Maryland State arts Council in 1988 and in 2009 and is the author of 5 published collections of poetry, A History of the Color Black, Dolphin-Moon Press, 1991; Since You Have No Body, winner of the Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, 2011; The Great Before and After, BrickHouse Books, 2011, and the self-published, Empire of Leaves, Singing Man Press, 2018. Essays have appeared recently in The New England Review, on lit hub-The Best of the Literary Internet, The Concho River Review, Broad Street Literary Review, The Razor, The Northern Virginia Review, and Blood and Thunder, and podcast on Pendustradio.com. Fallon’s poems have been frequently recorded on CDs and broadcast on Public Radio. His recent poetry chapbook, Leaf Notes: Poems of the Plague Years, was published by Writer’s Relief, and won the 2021 Water Sedge Poetry Prize.
To sample his work, read reviews, blogs and more, visit his website: michaelfallonpoetandessayist.com.
Jennifer A Sutherland is a poet and essayist with work in Hopkins Review, Denver Quarterly, Parhelion Literary, Appalachian Review and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Hollins University, where she was a teaching fellow, and she is an alumna of writing workshops at Bread Loaf, Kenyon Review and Tin House. Her first book, Bullet Points, is coming to River River Books in June, 2023. Natalie Shapero calls her work "relentless, harrowing, and tremendously smart." Kaveh Akbar chose her for inclusion in Best New Poets. She lives in Baltimore.
Alan C. Reese is the author of the chapbook Reports from Shadowland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Smartish Pace, Gargoyle, The Blue Mountain Review, The Baltimore Sun, Maryland Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Delaware Review, Welter, Grub Street, Attic, Bicycle Review, Danse Macabre, and the Loch Raven Review. He was the editor and founder of Dancing Shadow Review and the president of Abecedarian Books, Inc., a small press publisher for ten years. He served as the president of the Harford Poetry Society for two years. He teaches writing at Towson University.
Jennifer Keith is a web content writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Her poems have appeared in Sewanee Theological Review, The Nebraska Review, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Unsplendid, and elsewhere. Keith is the recipient of the 2014 John Elsberg poetry prize, and her poem “Eating Walnuts” was selected by Sherman Alexie for Best American Poetry 2015. In 2021 her poem “Cooper’s Hawk” was a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. She has published three chapbooks: Wonderland by Night (Shattered Wig, 1992), Sleepwalk (Tropos, 1995) and Truant Season (Apathy, 2022). Keith lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Matt Hohner has won or placed in numerous national and international poetry competitions, including wins in the Doolin International Poetry Prize in Ireland, the Oberon Magazine Poetry Prize, and the Maryland Writers’ Association Prize. His publications include Rattle: Poets Respond, Sky Island Journal, The Cardiff Review, The Storms Journal, New Contrast, Live Canon, and Prairie Schooner. An editor with Loch Raven Review, Hohner’s first collection Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House) was published in 2018.
I’m Lauren H. Smith, and I live in a Baltimore City row home overlooking a vibrant park. I care about loving people well, building healthy relationships, exploring new territory, and growing into a more whole person. I’m either writing poetry, nonfiction, songs, or some combination that reflects being painfully, wonderfully human in a beautifully broken world.
Equal parts deep, sassy, and silly, I straddle the line between joy and pain—obsessing over how the two intertwine. I’m here to help you pause. Get curious about it all. And embrace healing along the way. ‘Cause let’s face it: Being human is a trip that could use some extra light and grace.
Dan Cuddy was an editor of the Loch Raven Review. He was also a contributing editor of the Maryland Poetry Review and an editor for Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. His most recent collection of poetry entitled Handprint on the Window was published in 2003. His poems can also be found in End of 83, Broadkill Review, Welter, the Twisted Vine Literary Journal, the Pangolin Review, Madness Muse Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, the Rats’s Ass Review, Roanoke Review and, Gargoyle, and the LA Cultural Daily.
Lauren Russell Lauren Russell is a poet and writer in hybrid forms. She is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award for “venturesome, interdisciplinary work,” and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Her next book, A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024 as part of the Multiverse series. Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, Millay Arts, Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, Foglifter, Gulf Coast, the anthology Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and lives in Baltimore with her cats, Cat Jeoffry and Lady Day.
