Past Featured Poets
Manor Mill has been delighted to host these featured poets in past open-mic nights. Featured poets start the evening reading from either their published work or works-in-progress, which serves as a meaningful way to set the tone of the evening ahead when we invite younger or newer poets to share their work as well.
April 2024
Jona Colson
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.
March 2024
James Allen Hall
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
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.
February 2024
Lindsay Lusby
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.
December 2023
Susan Sonde
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.
November 2023
Clarinda Harriss
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."
October 2023
Stephen Hollaway
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 Leyva
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.
Twitter & Instagram: @sdleyva
September 2023
Shirley J. Brewer
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.
Kathy Mangan
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.
august 2023
Kari Martindale
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.
Instagram/Pinterest: karilogue
S.B. Merrow
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.
David Stant
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).
July 2023
David Beaudouin
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
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.
May 2023
Raymond Cummings
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.com
VIGILANTE FLUXUS (2015)
Whorl Without End: Poems (2020)
No Horizontal Tomorrow: A Poem (2022)
Thom Hawkins
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.com
In Name Only (2020)
A First Time for Anything (2020)
In Evidence (2021)
Alphabetical Orders (2021)
Musical Madeleines (2022)
Douglas William Garcia Mowbray
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
April 2023
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.
March 2023
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.
February 2023
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.
December 2022
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.
Daniel Cuddy
Dan Cuddy is currently an editor of the Loch Raven Review. In the past he was a contributing editor of the Maryland Poetry Review and an editor for Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. He has had a book of poetry published “Handprint on the Window” in 2003,. Most recently he has had poems published in the 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.