Saturday September 9 * 3pm * TICKETS

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. She was recently awarded a NYSCA Artist’s Grant for a collaboration with filmmaker Tara Nelson. Videos from this collab can be found at Air/Light and Dīstantia. Her Instagram is @minor_ecologist

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. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He is the Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland. With his wife, Elizabeth Bryant, Taylor curates the Green Way Reading Series at People’s Book in Takoma Park.

The Forget Why Reading Series brings together poets who question, play with, and derange their poetic inheritance, at times defying categorization as "poetry." Forget Why was named in honor of our beloved friend, poet Doug Lang (1941-2022), and is run by Leslie Bumstead and Cathy Eisenhower.

Uncertainty is hell, certainty is hell. It’s what and when
And where. It’s who. Forget why. The wolf is at the door.

-Doug Lang, “Namaste Sonnet” from In the Works