Anthology of Ohio's Appalachian Voices Seeks Submissions

Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour invites all poets with ties to Ohio and Appalachia (and so on - watch the video for details) to submit to the new anthology I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing. Deadline: October 30, 2021.

Video link: https://www.facebook.com/kari.gunter.seymour/videos/164094779131517.

More info: https://www.karigunterseymourpoet.com/submit.

Tongue-in-Groove Poetry Jam Returns to the Fillmore September 19th

Cleveland, it's time to celebrate the return of Tongue-in-Groove! Hosted by Heights Poet Laureate Ray McNiece (Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award Winner) with Al Moses on guitar, Nick Marino on bass, Michelle Clark on percussion and Tim Lachina on harmonica at the Millard Fillmore Presidential Library at 15617 Waterloo Road in the North Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland. The Poetry Jam happens at 6 p.m. starting on Sunday, September 19th. This month's featured poet is Renay Sanders. An open mic with the band will follow.

About the feature:

S. Renay Sanders learned to love the spoken word amidst a family of Appalachian storytellers and musicians. She secretly wrote poems for years, but came out of the poetry closet with a piece in the Hessler Street Poetry Anthology in 2010. Her poems have been included in anthologies published by the Writing Knights and Poet's Haven. Her work can also be found in ETERNAL SNOW (Nirala Publications, 2017), a worldwide anthology. Renay received a third place award for her poem, "Awakened to Bear Witness of Sweet Atrocities" in the 2012 Hessler Street Poetry Anthology. "Noteworthy Travelin" was the title poem of a broadside published by NightBallet. Her work was selected to be included in the 2016-2017 Women of Appalachia project "Women Speak." Most recently, Sanders is the author of DANCING IN PLACE: POEMS (Nirala Publications, 2020). A native Clevelander, her poems are inspired by the characters she encounters in life, her male-dominated family, husband, sons, grandsons and the beauty of the Cuyahoga Valley, where she now resides.

The Return of Brews + Prose!

Our friends at Brews + Prose are re-starting up their acclaimed reading series at Market Garden Brewery on Wednesday September 15th at 7 p.m.

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The following is from their Facebook event page:

Brews + Prose is back! And for now, like so many other things, Brews + Prose, will look a little different. We will be gathering upstairs on the Market Garden Brewpub Patio in an effort to spread out in the fresh air.

On September 15, we will be hosting three incredible readers:

Claire Luchette has published work in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Granta. A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Luchette graduated from the University of Oregon MFA program and has received grants and scholarships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Lighthouse Works, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the James Merrill House. Agatha of Little Neon is Luchette’s first novel.

Dotun Akintoye is a Nigerian American writer from Philadelphia. His work has appeared in outlets like The Los Angeles Review of Books and O, The Oprah Magazine. He is currently a staff writer at ESPN.

Natasha Oladokun is a poet and essayist. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, Twelve Literary Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets, Harvard Review Online, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. You can read her regular column The PettyCoat Chronicles—on pop culture and period dramas—at Catapult. She is Associate Poetry Editor at storySouth, and currently lives in Madison, WI.

We are hoping to find a way to safely host more great writers in the coming months, and we hope you'll be there with us.

 

Quartez Harris named Ohio Poet of the Year by the Ohio Poetry Day Association

Congratulations to Cleveland's very own Quartez Harris, who has been named 2021 Ohio Poet of the Year for his acclaimed book We Made It to School Alive (2020, Twelve Arts).

Click here to read more about it on the Ohio Poetry Association blog.

To contact the author, visit www.quartezharris.com.

Buy We Made It to School Alive from Twelve Arts Press.