Columbus Metropolitan Library hosts engaging national authors for talks, readings and discussions.

Ask questions and live chat with the guests from your computer or mobile device.

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Join Columbus Metropolitan Library as we celebrate National Poetry Month! Ohio poets Ruth Awad, Quartez Harris, and Ohio’s current Poet Laureate, Kari Gunter-Seymour, will share selections from their work, answer questions, and discuss other works that have inspired them. Make sure to drop your questions in the event chat after registering for our guests to answer during the event.

Ruth Awad is a 2021 NEA Poetry Fellow and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2020). She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and a recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Her poetry collections include A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), which won the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award, and the chapbook Serving (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and publications including Rattle, ONE, The LA Times and The New York Times. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, Cultural Daily, World Literature Today and Poem-a-Day.

A ninth generation Appalachian, she is the editor of I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices and the Women of Appalachia Project’s anthology series, Women Speak. Gunter-Seymour is the founder, curator, and host of Spoken & Heard, a seasonal performance series featuring poets, writers, and musicians from across the country. She is an artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts and a 2021-22 Pillar of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation For Appalachian Ohio.

Quartez Harris is a poet from Springfield, Ohio and the Ohio Poetry Association's 2021 Poet of the Year. Harris is the author of We Made It To School Alive, a full-length collection of poems published by Twelve Arts Press, and Nothing, But Skin, a poetry collection published in 2014 by Writing Knights Press. We Made It to School Alive was inspired by his work as a teacher and gives voice to the experiences of the children he works with every day who deal with structural barriers, intergenerational poverty, educational negligence and more. He is the first recipient of the Barbara Smith Writer-In-Resident at Twelve Literary Arts and a 2020 Baldwin House Fellow and his poetry and ideas have been featured in The Plain Dealer, Ideastream, and City Club of Cleveland. Harris' works in progress are two picture books and a young-adult novel in verse.

An Evening of Poetry