A Virtual Reading Series
Spoken & Heard is a seasonal series (spring and fall) of literary events hosted by Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour, featuring award-winning authors, poets and singer/songwriters from across the country. Events are hosted by the Dairy Barn Arts Center and sponsored by the Ohio Arts Council. The 2024 season will feature a variety of performers including poets David Baker, Ellen Bass and Kathy Fagan Grandinetti.
Darius Stewart is the author of Intimacies in Borrowed Light (EastOver Press 2022) and Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir (Belt Publishing 2024). His poetry and creative nonfiction essays appear or are forthcoming in Arkansas International, Brink, The Brooklyn Review, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Fourth Genre, Gargoyle, Meridian, The Potomac Review, Salamander, storySouth, Verse Daily and others. Darius received an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin (2007) and an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa (2020). In 2021, the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame honored him with the inaugural Emerging Writer Award. He is currently a Lulu “Merle” Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa.
Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir
Ben Kline (he/him/his) hails from the farmland valleys of west Appalachia but lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of Sagittarius A*, Dead Uncles, and the forthcoming It Was Never Supposed to Be, he is a storyteller, poet and Madonna mega fan. His work appears in Poet Lore, DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, MAYDAY, Florida Review, Bellingham Review, Gordon Square Review, POETRY, South Carolina Review and many other publications. Learn more about his work at https://benklineonline.wordpress.com/.
David Baker is author of thirteen books of poetry, recently Whale Fall (Norton, 2022), Swift: New and Selected Poems, (2019), Scavenger Loop (2015), and Never-Ending Birds (2009), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. His six books of prose include Seek After: Essays on Modern Lyric Poets (2018) and Show Me Your Environment (2014). Among his awards are prizes and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, Mellon Foundation, and Poetry Society of America. His work appears in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review. Baker lives and writes in Granville, Ohio, where he has lived for many years, teaching at Denison University. He has also taught at Kenyon College, the Ohio State University, University of Michigan, and for several semesters at the MFA low-residential program at Warren Wilson College.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande Books, 2024), and All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry and nonfiction at Old Dominion University.
Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who is an Associate Professor in the creative writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington. She also teaches in the graduate program at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is the author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down and The Light Always Breaks. In October of 2023, Angela’s novel, Homeward, a follow-up to When Stars Rain Down, was published by Harper.
Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University.