Spoken and Heard- April

April 20, 2023

Art & Culture, Free Fun, Workshops, Signature Event

Spoken & Heard is a seasonal series of literary events hosted by Kari Gunter-Seymour, Poet Laureate of Ohio, featuring award-winning authors, poets and singer/songwriters from across the country. April’s event will feature James Crews, Orchid Tierney, and Yalie Saweda Kamara, and will be held virtually over zoom. James Crews James Crews is the editor of the best-selling anthology, How to Love the World, which has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, as well as in The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He is the author of four prize-winning collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment, and his poems have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and Prairie Schooner. Crews teaches in the Poetry of Resilience seminars, which he co-founded with Danusha Laméris, and lives with his husband in Shaftsbury, Vermont. To sign up for weekly poems and prompts, visit jamescrews.net. Orchid Tierney Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand, who now lives in Gambier, Ohio. She is the author of the collection a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System, 2019) and seven chapbooks: looking at the tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, forthcoming), my beatrice (above/ground press, 2020), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX Books, 2019), Gallipoli Diaries (Gauss PDF, 2016), blue doors (Belladonna Press, 2018) brachiation (Gumtree, 2012), the world in small parts (Dancing Girl, 2012). Her scholarship, reviews, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Jacket2, Venti, Fractured Ecologies, Substance, the Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900, among others. She is the recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Y22 Individual Artist Excellence Award and is the Black Earth Institute Fellow for 2022–25. She is an assistant professor of English at Kenyon College. www.orchidtierney.com Yalie Saweda Kamara Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Selected as the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term), she is the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration (The Hawkins Project, 2022) and the author of A Brief Biography of My Name (African Poetry Book Fund/Akashic Books, 2018) and When the Living Sing (Ledge Mule Press, 2017). Kamara has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series competition and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati, an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, Bloomington and an MA in French Culture and Civilization from Middlebury College. For more: www.yaylala.com