Join us for a reading featuring Lily Brown, author of Blade Work, winner of the 2024 New Measure Poetry Prize from Parlor Press; Emma Winsor Wood, author of Preferred Internal Landscape (Ornithopter, 2025); and Kurt Olsson, author of The Unnumbered Anniversaries (Fernwood Press, 2025).

Lily Brown is the author of Blade Work (winner of the 2024 New Measure Poetry Prize from Parlor Press) and Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), as well as several chapbooks, including The Haptic Cold (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, A Public Space, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Lana Turner, Mississippi Review, and Oversound, among others. She lives in Maine with her family and works as a writing teacher.

Emma Winsor Wood is the author of Preferred Internal Landscape (Ornithopter, 2025) and The Real World (BlazeVOX, 2022). Her writing has appeared in The Drift, the American Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Fence, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Originally from New York City, but most at home in California, she is currently a professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Kurt Olsson’s a former Peace Corps volunteer who taught English at a small university in the Ferghana Valley in the late 1990s. Two years ago, Olsson moved from Maryland to Wisconsin so he could live near Lake Michigan and earn his doctorate in English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Olsson’s most recent poetry collection, The Unnumbered Anniversaries, was just published by Fernwood Press. He’s published two previous collections, Burning Down Disneyland, and What Kills What Kills Us, winner of the Gerald Cable Book Award; the Towson University Prize for Literature, given annually to the best book published by a Maryland writer; and Peace Corps Writers’ Best Poetry Book of 2008. Kurt lives on the top floor of a duplex with his youngest daughter, four cats, and an American pit bull terrier named Coco. He volunteers with the Wisconsin Humane Society, facilitates classes for the National Alliance on Mental Health, and tutors as part of Common Ground’s Future Scholars Program.

Poetry Reading: Lily Brown, Emma Winsor Wood, and Kurt Olsson