May 3rd thru 5th: Jawbone in Kent

Join us at the annual Jawbone poetry festival in Kent! Contact RC Wilson at rcwilsonii@gmail.com for more information.

April 27: Fireside Poetry Festival in Chagrin Falls

From our friends at Fireside Book Shop:

More info: https://www.firesidebookshop.com/events/2024/4/27/fireside-book-shop-poetry-festival.

Fireside Book Shop
29 North Franklin Street
Chagrin Falls, OH, 44022

April 15th: Pádraig Ó Tuama comes to John Carroll University

Reposted from our friend Philip Metres:

NOT TO BE MISSED! On April 15th at 6pm, in JCU’s Donahue Auditorium (Dolan Science Center) at John Carroll University, join us for a talk and reading of poems by celebrated Irish poet, theologian, and podcaster Pádraig Ó Tuama.

Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, conflict resolution mediator, and the author of Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love (2024), Poetry Unbound (2022), Feed the Beast (2022), Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community (2017), In the Shelter (2015), Sorry for Your Troubles (2013), and Readings from the Books of Exile (2012). About his most recent collection of poems, Feed the Beast, Jericho Brown says, “This book is unashamed about poetry’s relationship to the spirit. I would go as far as saying this book is one way we know poetry is prayer.” His memoir, In the Shelter, interweaves everyday stories with narrative theology, gospel reflections with mindfulness, and Celtic spirituality with poetry for a memoir that relates ideas of shelter and welcome to journeys of life.

For those who don’t know Pádraig, he is a man of many talents—a poet, theologian, mediator, podcaster (one of the best podcasts on poetry, and another on peacebuilding for Corrymeela). He’s wise, engaging, and deeply moving, and NOT TO BE MISSED!

All are welcome! Free and open to the public. Books for sale by Mac’s Backs.

John Carroll University
1 John Carroll Boulevard
University Heights, OH 44118

April 18th: Ekphrastacy at Heights Arts

Ekphrastacy: Artists Talk and Poets Respond

Thursday, April 18th at 7:00 p.m.

Join Heights Poet Laureate Siaara Freeman and guest poets Beks Freeman, Carrie George, and Philip Metres for a night of surrealism and the unconventional. For this Ekphrastacy, poets respond to the current exhibition on view in Heights Art's gallery, Irrational Objects: Backwards Into the Future. Their live poetry will undoubtedly respond to and interrogate surrealist themes of the unexpected and uncanny. Artists in the exhibition will also speak about their work. Reserve your spot today!

Heights Arts
2175 Lee Road
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118
heightsarts.org

April 10: Cornelius Eady and Arlene Keizer at Kent State

Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Reading
Featuring Cornelius Eady and Arlene Keizer

When: Wednesday, April 10, 7:00 pm
Where: African Community Theatre, Oscar Ritchie Hall (225 Terrace Drive), Kent, Ohio

Cornelius Eady is the author of several books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Hardheaded Weather, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, The Gathering of My Name, which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, and his most recent collection The War Against the Obvious. With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. Eady has been a teacher for over twenty years, and is currently the Chair of Excellence in the English Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.

Arlene Keizer, an Afro-Caribbean-American poet and scholar, writes about the literature, lived experience, theory, and visual art of the African Diaspora. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, she later earned an MA in English and Creative Writing (Poetry) at Stanford University and a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery, and her poems and articles have appeared in African American Review, American Literature, Kenyon Review, PMLA, Radical Teacher, TriQuarterly, and other journals and exhibit catalogues. New poems are forthcoming in Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. Arlene completed Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black published by The Kent State University Press with the support of fellowships from the Beinecke Library at Yale and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she has been reading Beauford Delaney's mail. Born to emigrants from Trinidad, she lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at Pratt Institute.

April 12: Zach Savich and Joyelle McSweeny kick off the Cleveland Poetry Festival