The University of Cincinnati Libraries and the Elliston Poetry Room announce the next roster of poets for Poetry Stacked, a semi-regular poetry reading series held in the 6th floor east stacks of the Walter C. Langsam Library.
The next event, scheduled for Wednesday, April 12 at 4pm, will be an expanded program in celebration of National Poetry Month. The poetry reading will feature Kari Gunter-Seymour, Poet Laureate of Ohio, and celebrate poetry by graduating University of Cincinnati doctoral students: Nick Molbert, Marianne Chan, Connor Yeck and Taylor Byas. Following the poetry readings, attendees are invited to a reception in the Elliston Poetry Room as we mark the successful conclusion of the 2022/23 Poetry Stacked series.
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press 2022), and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions 2020) winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. She is an artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts, a Pillars of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio, the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak. Her work has been featured in Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times and Poem-a-Day.
Nick Molbert is a writer from South Louisiana and the author of two chapbooks–Goodness Gracious and Cocodrie Elegy—both from Foundlings Press. His work has been supported by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — where he received his MFA — and the University of Cincinnati — where he completed his PhD last month. You can find his critical and creative work in places like the Annulet, DIAGRAM, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and Palette Poetry and forthcoming from Five South, The Greensboro Review, and Grist.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow.
Connor Yeck’s writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, Passages North, The Journal, Ninth Letter, and Strange Horizons. His poetry has been recognized with awards from Sonora Review, Indiana Review, and The Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival, and he is a recipient of a 2023 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, he’s an Associate Editor at The Cincinnati Review.
Taylor Byas. Dr. Taylor Byas (she/her) is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is an Associate Editor for Cincinnati Review and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Bloodwarm and Shutter, and her debut full-length I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times will be out with Soft Skull Press in August 2023. She is represented by Rena Rossner of the Deborah Harris Agency.
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The mission of Poetry Stacked is to celebrate poetry and raise awareness of the collections of both UC Libraries and the Elliston Poetry Room. Each reading engages audiences via exposure to contemporary poetry and increases appreciation for both the talents of UC and community poets, as well as for poetry itself. Poetry Stacked is free and open to all to attend. Following each reading, guests are invited to tour the Elliston Poetry Room.
The intent of the series is to enrich and engage the UC campus and Cincinnati communities in accordance with the Libraries’ Strategic Framework and the Next Lives Here Strategic Directions in support of Academic Excellence and Community Engagement. It aligns with the Libraries’ vision as the globally engaged, intellectual commons of the university – positioning ourselves as the hub of collaboration, digital innovation, and scholarly endeavor on campus and beyond.