A Reading with Alison C. Rollins and Paul Tran

Side by side photos of the featured readers are outlined with a black line and displayed over a light blue background. Beneath the photos are the words "Open Mouth Presents: Alison C. Rollins and Paul Tran." Availability of sign language interpretation is indicated by the presence of an icon showing two hands signing in the bottom left corner. Left photo: The Black writer Alison C. Rollins visible from the waist up. She smiles wide while making direct eye contact with the camera. She wears a yellow patterned blazer and her hair is long and curly framing her face. Right photo: The poet, Paul Tran, is visible from the shoulders up, looking over their shoulder and making eye contact with the camera. Photo credit: Paul Tran.

Join us on Sunday, June 12, 2022 at 7:00pm Central for a reading by featured poets Alison C. Rollins and Paul Tran. This public event is part of our Annual Retreat, and participants will share their work alongside Alison and Paul.

The reading will take place virtually via Zoom with Zoom auto captions, and an ASL interpreter will be present. Access copies of all poems will be provided via Google Docs. We will read our access statement to start the event.

Register

Every donation to Open Mouth Literary Center supports our programming, ASL interpreters, and featured poets. Become a monthly patron on Patreon or make a one-time donation at our PayPal or to our GoFundMe campaign.

Support for Open Mouth Literary Center is provided, in part, by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from our supporters on Patreon, Mid-America Arts Alliance, and the ARt Connect Program. The ARt Connect program is generously supported by the Walmart Foundation and implemented by Mid-America Arts Alliance in partnership with the Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange (CACHE) of the Northwest Arkansas Council. Additional support for Mid-America Arts Alliance is from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.

FEATURED READERS:

Alison C. Rollins (born and raised in St. Louis city) is currently an MFA candidate at Brown University. She holds a Bachelor of Science (summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) in Psychology from Howard University and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her work, across genres, has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a recipient of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. A 2020 Pushcart Prize winner, her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Rollins has held faculty as well as librarian appointments at various institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College, and Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, from Penguin in the US and the UK. Their work appears in The New Yorker, the Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is a Visiting Faculty at Pacific University MFA in Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.