Saturday October 10 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Theodora Danylevich is a DC Poet who also teaches Writing and Disability Studies at Georgetown. Some of her poetry has appeared in Vanitas and Phoebe. She’s into short forms, collaborations, and endless homophonic translations of aged epic poems. She occasionally sings and writes for Jacky Cougar and the Vampyres from Africa. 

Casey Smith (he/him) is a human born in Pasadena, CA in 1965 ,CE. He taught  for nearly 20 years at the deceased Corcoran College of Art + Design alongside Doug Lang, Beth Joselow, Bernard Welt, Nan Fry, and other inspiring educators. He is a Virgo, and his favorite color is light navy blue. He is now the Executive Director of the Frederick Book Arts Center. His poems have appeared in print and online here and there.

Tom Mandel is the author/co-author of more than 20 books/chapbooks including Realism, Letters of the Law, To the Cognoscenti, and The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collaborative autobiography by San Francisco Language Poets. Mandel’s writing has been published in newspapers, literary journals and anthologies around the world, including the influential In the American Tree and The Norton Anthology of Post-Modern Verse (First Edition). Mandel has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois and San Francisco State University, where he was Director of SFSU Poetry Center. He has also been a consultant to UNESCO and a technology entrepreneur. Tom Mandel grew up in Chicago and was educated in its jazz and blues clubs and on the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He lived in New York, Paris, and San Francisco before moving to the Washington DC area.

Saturday September 19 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Rod Smith is the author of Touché (Wave, 2015), Deed (U. Iowa, 2007), Music or Honesty (Roof, 2003), and The Good House (Spectacular Books, 2001). He edits the journal Aerial, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. He has taught at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, The Maryland Institute College of Art, and The Corcoran College of Art + Design. Smith edited The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley (U. Cal Press, 2014) with Kaplan Harris and Peter Baker.

Heather Fuller is the author of perhaps this is a rescue fantasy, Dovecote, Startle Response and Dick Cheney’s Heart and has work included in out of everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women, Women in the Avant Garde and #MeToo Poetry Collective. Her essays about writing and culture appear at StartleResponse.com. After three decades working in nonprofits, PR and healthcare in D.C. and Baltimore, she returned to her home state North Carolina, where she works as a cardiac RN and serves with local animal advocacy networks.

Saturday May 16 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Hilary Plum is a writer, editor, and teacher in Cleveland, Ohio. Her recent books include the novel State Champ (Bloomsbury, 2025), the long poem Important Groups (Community Mausoleum, 2025), and the essay collection Hole Studies (Fonograf Editions, 2022). With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. With Zach Peckham she hosts the podcast Index for Continuance.

Terence Winch has published ten books of poems, the most recent being It Is As If Desire (Hanging Loose, 2024) and That Ship Has Sailed (Pitt Poetry Series, 2023). Winner of an American Book Award and the Columbia Book Award, he has also published two story collections and a novel. He was the guest editor for Best American Poetry 2025 and the editor of the Best American Poetry blog’s “Pick of the Week” feature. Winch is the recipient of an NEA poetry fellowship and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. Also a musician and songwriter, he co-founded the original Celtic Thunder, the traditional Irish music group.

Saturday April 25 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Maureen Thorson is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Share the Wealth (Veliz Books 2022). Her book of lyric essays, On Dreams, was published with Bloof Books in 2023. She is currently trying to come up with a title for her new poetry manuscript that is neither mind-bogglingly pretentious nor extremely silly. She lives in Maine.

Manya Magnus is an HIV prevention epidemiologist and a professor in and chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. In addition to research-related writing, she is the author of three textbooks (Jones & Bartlett Learning, Inc.), one lay health book (Wiley), and a lifetime of creative prose that is slowly seeking the light of day. She lives in Northern Virginia.

Saturday March 14 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Edmund Berrigan is the author of More Gone (City Lights, 2019), a book of poetry.  With Anselm Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Nick Sturm, he co-edited Get the Money (Collected Prose 1961-1983) by Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022). He also edited the Collected Poems of Steve Carey, forthcoming in 2026 from Subpress.

Lauren Russell is the author of three books, including A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and Descent (Tarpaulin Sky, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award. An NEA and Cave Canem fellow, she teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Saturday February 21 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Rod Smith is the author of Touché (Wave, 2015), Deed (U. Iowa, 2007), Music or Honesty (Roof, 2003), and The Good House (Spectacular Books, 2001). He edits the journal Aerial, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. He has taught at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, The Maryland Institute College of Art, and The Corcoran College of Art + Design. Smith edited The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley (U. Cal Press, 2014) with Kaplan Harris and Peter Baker.

K. Lorraine Graham is a poet, mixed media artist and diviner inspired by everyday life, family history, and the oracular. She creates a mix of abstract and representational pieces that evoke introspection and self-analysis. Growing up all over the world in Papua New Guinea, Chile, Mexico, China and Maine, she’s been drawn to art and language since childhood. After studying east Asian studies and Chinese at George Washington University and getting an M.F.A. at the University of California, San Diego, her work evolved into a blend of poetry and mixed media works on paper. She’s the author of The Rest Is Censored (Bloof Books) and Terminal Humming (Edge Books), and an artist book of drawings called Semiotic Squares (Primary Writing). Her work has been shown at the Umbrella Art Fair, Kreeger Museum, Stable Arts, and But, Also.

***POSTPONED*** to be rescheduled for Fall 2026

Saturday January 24 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Sylvia Jones lives in Baltimore, MD, and teaches creative writing at George Washington University. She is poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press—and senior reader for the journal, Ploughshares. Her debut collection —Television Fathers (Meekling Press, 2024) was published last fall. It’s follow-up, Dope Callisthenics—is forthcoming from Relegation Books. Her writing appears in DIAGRAM, Smartish Pace, Shenandoah, R&R Journal, Blackbird, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She earned her M.F.A. from American University in Washington D.C.

Sommer Browning is a poet and writer, mostly. Her latest book is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). She’s the author of two other collections of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I’m Celebrating, as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book, You’re On My Period (Counterpath), and others. Her poetry, art writing, and visual art have appeared in Hyperallergic, Bomb, Artforum, The American Poetry Review, The Comics Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Saturday December 13 * 7pm * FREE

Come join us for a celebration of Forget Why as we enter our fourth year. Poems will be read, drinks will be drunk, snacks will be et.
Bring a poem to read, a beverage of your choice and/or snacks to share, if you like. All are welcome!

Saturday November 15 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Ted Dodson is the author of An Orange(Pioneer Works / Wonder, 2021) and co-translator of Death at the Very Touch / The Cold by Jaime Saenz (Action Books, forthcoming). He is a contributing editor for BOMB, an editor-at-large for Futurepoem, and a former editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Sending postcards, stickers, voicemails, and other ephemera across the country and around the world, BUCK DOWNS creates a body of work as boundless and intimate as life and death. In Paideuma's "Poets We Live With" issue, Anne Boyer writes: "... the postcard performances of Buck Downs are a world-historically perfect match between poetry and method of publication." Coming soon from above/ground press is [OKAY], a second collection of Instagram poems.

Saturday October 11 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Gina Myers is the author of four books of poetry, including Works & Days (Radiator Press, 2025) and Some of the Times (Barrelhouse, 2020). She lives in Philadelphia where she co-edits the tiny with Ebs Sanders and Cul-de-sac of Blood with J †Johnson.

Ken Jacobs is a poet living in DC. He is the author of Sooner (Phylum Press, 2009) and unmet (Primary Writing Books, 2015) and poems here and there in journals. He has worked on a number of projects exploring different compositional techniques - a few of the artifacts of that play are available at deegeep.com.

Saturday September 27 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Hajar Hussaini is a poet and translator. Disbound (University of Iowa Press, 2022) is her debut poetry collection. She received a 2024 Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature for her translation of the poetry collection Wounded Vita Nuda by Maral Taheri (Deep Vellum, 2026) and a 2025 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Khosraw Mani’s novel, Death and His Brother (Syracuse University Press, 2026). Hussaini has won fellowships from the MacDowell and Baldwin for the Arts, as well as a 2023 Carol Anne Donahue Poetry Prize from Russell Sage College and a faculty development grant from Skidmore College, where she is an assistant teaching professor of English. Alongside Matthew Klane and Amie Zimmerman, she co-curates the Salon Salvage reading series in Troy, NY. Her writings and translations have appeared in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Annulet, and Asymptote, anthologized in Rumi: Roaming and Daedalus, and translated into Slovak by Terézia Klasová for Revue Prostor.

Jamie Perez is the author of the chapbook There Were Rivers Before There Were People (Big Lucks, 2016), and his work has appeared in various magazine online and in print. In 2020, along with Adam Good, he founded STATIONS, a publisher of creative gaming tools and resources. Together with Adam, Rob Turpin and others, he created and published An Infinity of Ships(2025). Jamie lives and believes in Baltimore.

Saturday May 17 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Elizabeth Willis is the author of Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism, and film. Her other books of poetry include Alive (New York Review Books, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Address; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; The Human Abstract; and the artist’s book Spectral Evidence . She also writes about the intersection of art and labor and edited the volume Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Beth Joselow is the author of eight books and chapbooks of poems, the most recent being Someone Is Awake All Night (2024). She has often collaborated with visual artists, notably Pablo Makov of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and the late Dennis O’Neil of Alexandria, VA. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including American Poetry Review, Gargoyle, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Boston Review and New American Writing. She is the author of Writing Without The Muse, a popular book of writing exercises. She lives in Silver Spring, MD.

Saturday April 26 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Holly Melgard is the author Fetal Position (Roof 2021), named one of “Artforum’s Best of 2021,” and Read Me: Selected Works (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), which surveys her poems, short stories, and critical essays. Prior to this, she co-edited and designed Troll Thread Press for over a decade, a dual release print-on-demand + free .pdf platform, where she self-published ten other books, including several co-authored with Joey Yearous-Algozin. Her work has appeared in Best American Anthology of Experimental Writing, BOMB Magazine, and the German journal Merkur among other places. She lives in Brooklyn where she designs books and teaches writing.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of seven poetry books, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021)  and the newly released Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press 2024.). Her poems have appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Slowdown podcast and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. An Assistant Teaching Professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, she first published in Hanging Loose Magazine as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.

Joshua Smith is the author of By (Non Plus Ultra, 2021). His work appears in publications like Yalobusha Review, Word For/Word, and TIMBER and has been exhibited at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop and Harvard University. For more, visit jsmith.bio.

Saturday March 29 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. She is the author of the chapbooks I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), and Things I Have Made a Fiction, which was recently the winner of the Oversound Chapbook Prize. Her first full-length book, Caetano, will be out with the Elephants in 2025, and her translation of Roberta Iannamico's Many Poems will be out with The Song Cave later this year.

Matthew Gordon is a poet and artist based in the Washington DC area. His work has been published in numerous publications including Mirage #4/Period(ical), Personal Space (Vallejo) and theplaidreview. His visual art has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery and other venues.

Saturday February 22 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Vanessa Saunders is a professor of practice at Loyola University New Orleans. Her feminist, experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize with Fiction Collective 2 and was published by University of Alabama Press. Her writing has appeared in Writer's Digest, Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Passages North, The Writer’s Chronicle, and [PANK] among others.

K. Lorraine Graham is a poet, diviner and mixed media artist inspired by everyday life and family history. She makes a mix of abstract and representational pieces that evoke introspection and self-analysis. She is the author of The Rest Is Censored (Bloof Books) and Terminal Humming (Edge Books), and an artist book of drawings called Semiotic Squares (Primary Writing). Her work has been featured at the Kreeger Museum, Stable Arts, and But, Also. She lives in Washington, D.C. Follow her on instagram @klorrainegraham.

Saturday January 25 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Aditi Machado's third volume of poetry, Material Witness, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in October 2024. Her other works include the poetry collections Emporium (Nightboat, 2020) and Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017), a translation from the French of Farid Tali’s novel Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016), the essay pamphlet The End (Ugly Duckling, 2020); and several poetry chapbooks. Machado’s writing appears in journals like BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, Lana Turner, Volt, Western Humanities Review, and Jacket2, among others.

Bianca Rae Messinger is a poet and translator living and working in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of the chapbooks “The Love of God” (Inpatient Press, 2016) and “parallel bars” (Center for Book Arts, 2021) and translator of “In the Jungle There is Much to DO” [comunidad del sur [mauricio gatti], Berlin Biennale, 2020] among others. Her book pleasureis amiracle is out in January 2025 from Nightboat.

Christopher Kondrich is a poet and writer whose third book, Tread Upon, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2026. He is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series, Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019, and as a finalist for The Believer Book Award, as well as Contrapuntal (Parlor Press, 2013). He is also the co-editor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming January 2025). His poetry and essays appear widely in such venues as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review.

Saturday December 14 * 7pm * Free / donations * RSVP

FORGET WHY GROUP READING AND CELEBRATION

Event is free - donations welcome!

Join us for a celebration of the Forget Why poetry series. We are about to turn two years old! So it’s kind of a birthday party too. Poems will be read, drinks will be drunk, snacks will be et. Bring the beverage of your choice if you like, as well as any snacks to share. All are welcome!

Friday November 15 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Chris Nealon teaches in the English Department at Johns Hopkins, and lives in Washington, DC. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Heteronomy (Edge Books) and The Shore (Wave Books), which was a finalist for the 2020 National Critics’ Book Circle Award. His latest volume is All About You.

Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. His new book, Wrong Heaven Again, is available from Birds, LLC. He is also the author of General Motors, Valu-Plus, Old News, and several chapbooks. Recent poems have appeared in Prolit, Wax Nine Journal, and Windfall Room. Eckes has worked as an adjunct professor at numerous institutions and as a labor organizer in education. With Kim Gek Lin Short, he runs Radiator Press.

Saturday October 19 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Thea Brown is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in River Styx, Oversound, LitHub, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.

Julie Carr’s most recent books are Underscore; Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West; Real Life: An Installation; Climate, co-written with Lisa Olstein; and the essay collection, Someone Shot My Book. She lives in Denver where she co-founded and helps to run Counterpath and teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Saturday September 28 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Robert Fitterman is the author of 15 books of poetry. His most recent book, Creve Coeur, is a long poem that has just been published with Winter Editions (Fall 2024). Other titles include: This Window Makes Me Feel (Ugly Duckling Presse), No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Ugly Duckling Presse), Nevermind (Wonder Books) and Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books). He is the founding member of the artists-poets collective Collective Task http://collectivetask.magnetberg.de/. He lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.

LB Bender lives and works in Baltimore. Past publications include Parking Garage (theartofeveryone.com), Whale Box (Publishing Genius), and inclusion in The i.e. Reader (Narrow House). LB will offer a setting-specific work at Forget Why.

Saturday May 11 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator(Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science(Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their fifth book, Negative Money, is available now. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland. Their new chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018) and The Awful Truth (Golias Books 2017). They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams, art, and love have taken.

Saturday April 20 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Chris Mason is a Baltimore poet and songwriter. He is a member of two musical groups, Old Songs, who translate Archaic Greek poetry and put it to music, and The Tinklers. Poetry books: Poems of a Doggy (pod, 1977), Hum Who Hiccup (Narrowhouse, 2011), Something Something Morning (Blabbermouth,2020), and Of Rare Earths (forthcoming from Uncollected Press). Accompanying Chris will be Bill Engstrand (upright bass), currently a PhD student in Literature and Film at Morgan State University. He is currently working on a short film structured around the poems of Langston Hughes.

Ward Tietz is a visual poet and word artist best known for his installations and performances using large three-dimensional letters and words. Working in a variety of media, from sculpture to works on paper, he has exhibited and performed his work in galleries, festivals, art centers and museums in the United Sates and Europe since the late 1980s. Ward’s current work includes Hg-The Liquid, a book of rubrical visual poetry published by 1913 Press. He has taught in Europe and the United States, locally at Georgetown, from 2002-2020.

Saturday March 9 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Doug Lang, poet, teacher, and friend, exerted an influence on art and poetry that is impossible to exaggerate. Thousands of students at the Corcoran College of Art and Design learned directly from Doug that poetry and writing are open and accessible. Poets, especially in the greater Washington DC area, revered Doug for his humor, wit, innovation, and knowledge. Like James Joyce and Dublin, Doug never really left Swansea and his beloved Swans, even though he lived most of his life in DC. Doug died in November of 2022.

Friends and former students will gather at Rhizome for a reading to celebrate his life, poetry, and friendship. Please join us. Seats are limited.

Saturday February 17 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Rod Smith is the author of Touché (Wave, 2015), Deed (U. Iowa, 2007), Music or Honesty (Roof, 2003), and The Good House (Spectacular Books, 2001). He edits the journal Aerial, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. He has taught at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, The Maryland Institute College of Art, and The Corcoran College of Art + Design. Smith edited The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley (U. Cal Press, 2014) with Kaplan Harris and Peter Baker.

Cathy Eisenhower lives and works as a psychotherapist in Washington, DC, and is the author of Language of the Dog-heads (Phylum 2001), clearing without reversal (Edge 2008), would with and (Roof 2009), distance decay (Ugly Duckling 2015), and animalitos (Primary Writing 2017). She has translated the selected poems of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi and co-curates a reading series at Rhizome DC. Her work has appeared in The Recluse, Aufgabe, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence.

Leslie Bumstead is the author of Cipher/Civilian (Edge Books 2005). Her work has appeared in Open Letters, Boog City, Hotel Amerika, West Wind Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Rhizome DC and in Maryland prisons.

Saturday December 9 * 6-10pm

FORGET WHY GROUP READING AND CELEBRATION

Join us for a celebration of the Forget Why poetry series. We are about to turn one year old! So it’s kind of a birthday party too. Poems will be read, drinks will be drunk, snacks will be et. Bring the beverage of your choice if you like, as well as any snacks to share.  Poets reading include Rod Smith, Sarah Sohn, Ryan Walker, Magus Magnus, Quincéy Xavier, and more! Event is free - donations welcome!

Saturday November 18 * 7pm * TICKETS

Paul Killebrew was born in 1978 in Nashville, Tennessee. His newest book is a double book, Impersonal Rainbow and The Bisexual Purge, out from Canarium in October 2023. His previous books, all from Canarium, are Flowers, Ethical Consciousness, and To Literally You. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Chia-Lun Chang is the author of Prescribee (2022), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, An Alien Well-Tamed and One Day We Become Whites. She has received support from Jerome Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tofte Lake Center, Poets House, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council among others. Chia-Lun teaches contemporary Taiwanese poetry and fiction at the Brooklyn Public Library. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in Brooklyn.

Melissa Dickey is the author of three books of poetry: Dragons and The Lily Will (from Rescue Press) and Ordinary Entanglement, now available from Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Her poems and essays have been published in jubilat, Interim, the Laurel Review, the Spectacle, and Bennington Review, among other publications. Originally from New Orleans, she’s earned degrees from the University of Washington and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she teaches high school English and parents her four children.

Saturday October 14 * 3pm * TICKETS

Ken Jacobs is a poet living in DC. He is the author of Sooner (Phylum Press, 2009) and unmet (Primary Writing Books, 2015), and he’s built digital projects available at deegeep.com that invite collaboration with other poets.

poet, writer, and teacher, erica kaufman, is the author of three books of poetry: POST CLASSIC, INSTANT CLASSIC (both from Roof Books), and censory impulse (Factory School). she is co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974.  recent poems can be found in Ursula and e-flux. kaufman's prose, focused on contemporary feminist poetics and pedagogy, appears in: The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein; The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times; Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies; Reading Experimental Writing; and The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. ). in collaboration with the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, kaufman co-coordinates the Teacher Resource Center for Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, a course offered each fall as a MOOC (massive online open course). she is the director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking where she is also Writer-in-Residence. 

Saturday September 9 * 3pm * TICKETS

The Forget Why Reading Series brings together poets who question, play with, and derange their poetic inheritance, at times defying categorization as "poetry."

Kristen Gallagher is the author of three books: 85% True / minor ecologies (Skeleton Man 2017), Grand Central (Troll Thread 2016), and We Are Here (Truck Books 2011). Recent work appears in Peach Mag, The Baffler, and Air/Light. A 2021 collaboration with Human Scale, "hs341: 85% True/minor ecologies," an infinitely generative audio piece using sounds of Florida, is available through the Human Scale app.

Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. With his wife, Elizabeth Bryant, Taylor curates the Green Way Reading Series at People’s Book in Takoma Park.

Thursday June 29 * 7 pm * RSVP

Forget Why Poetry Series presents… Joe Hall is a Buffalo-based writer and reading series curator. His five books of poetry include Fugue & Strike (2023) and Someone’s Utopia (2018). He has performed and delivered talks nationally at universities, living rooms, squats, and rivers. Danika Stegeman LeMay’s work has appeared in APARTMENT, Blue Arrangements, CLOAK, Ethel Zine, Leavings, and Word for/ Word, among other places. Danika’s debut collection of poems, Pilot (2020), was published by Spork Press. substantive.material is a work of epiancestral process[ing] with quincéy.xavier and Sarah Bitamazire.

Saturday June 3 * 7 pm * RSVP

Forget Why Poetry Series presents… Phyllis Rosenzweig was a curator for many years at the Hirshhorn Museum. She co- published the poetry journal, Primary Writing with Diane Ward from 1995 to 2008 and currently edits Primary Writing Books. Sarah Sohn (she/her) is Co-Director of the Braiding Seeds Fellowship. Sarah has worked on small vegetable farms on and off since she was a teenager and has had the joy of working with hundreds of brilliant beginning farmers since 2015. Sarah is Korean American and grew up in Michigan. Susan M. Schultz grew up mostly in northern Virginia, and has lived in Hawai`i since 1990. She is author of several books of poetry and poetic prose, most recently _I Want to Write an Honest Sentence_ (Talisman) and _Lilith Walks_ (BlazeVox).