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. These virtual sessions are hosted by the Dairy Barn Arts Center and sponsored by the Ohio Arts Council. The fall 2024 season boasts three Thursday sessions, and each Zoom lasts from 7-8pm.
Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs, and author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). She is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE grant fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.
Coggin was awarded the 2023 Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award for Visionary Service, and the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award for Arts in Education. She was twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year. Her fierce and tender poetry has been nominated six times for The Pushcart Prize, and awarded Best of the Net in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, The Night Heron Barks, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Pirene’s Fountain, About Place Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Tupelo Press, and elsewhere. Coggin is Editor-at-Large at SWIMM, Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. She lives with her wife in a peaceful valley, where they tend to wild ones and each other.
Kathy Fagan’s sixth poetry collection is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022, the winner of the 2023 William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous book, Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she’s been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an Ingram Merrill fellowship, residencies at The Frost Place, Yaddo and MacDowell, and was named Ohio Poet of the Year for 2017. Fagan’s work has appeared in venues such as The Atlantic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Poetry. She co-founded the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where she teaches poetry and co-edits the Wheeler Poetry Prize Book Series for The Journal and OSU Press.
Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Nation, Kenyon Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among others. She is an Assistant Professor of African American / African Diasporic Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at its Center for African American Poetry & Poetics.
Horsepower and Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology
Mary B. Moore’s five poetry books include Dear If, Orison Books 2022; Flicker, Dogfish Head Award 2016; The Book Of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center 1998, and the prize-winning chapbooks Amanda and the Man Soul from EMRYS, 2017, and Eating the Light from Sable Books, 2016. Poems appear lately in Birmingham Poetry Review, POETRY, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, Terrain, Calyx, Still the Journal, Cortland Review, and more. She has won NELLE’s Three Sister’s Prize, Birmingham Poetry Review’s Collins’ Award, and second place in Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize.
Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.
Dustin Brookshire (he/him) is the recipient of the 2024 Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship awarded by Poetry at the Sea and the author of three chapbooks, most recently Never Picked First For Playtime(Harbor Editions, 2023). He’s the co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023), which was named to the 2024 “Books All Georgians Should Read” list by the Georgia Center for the Book. Dustin is the founder of the Wild & Precious Life Series, Limp Wrist, and the Why I Write series. He also volunteers as Punch Bucket Lit’s director of virtual programs. Visit him at dustinbrookshire.com.