We invite you to join us for our final reading, featuring poets who have played a significant part in the Open Mouth community.
ACCESS NOTES: The reading will take place virtually via Zoom with Zoom and Otter.ai auto captions. An ASL interpreter will be present. Access copies of poems will be made available via Google Docs. Our Access Statement will be read before we begin.
Recommended for attendees 16 years and above.
FEATURED POETS:
Brody Parrish Craig (they/them) is the author of The Patient is an Unreliable Historian (October 2024) & Boyish, which won the 2019 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their writing has been published in Muzzle Magazine, Poetry, Mississippi Review, New South, Missouri Review, and TYPO, among others. They are the editor of TWANG, a regional anthology of trans and gender nonconforming creators from the South and Midwest.
CD Eskilson is a trans poet, editor, and translator living in Arkansas. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright/Academy of American Poets Prize, as well as a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Pushcart Prize nominee. Their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen, is forthcoming from Acre Books.
Geffrey Davis’s third book of poems, One Wild Word Away, was published by BOA Editions in April 2024. His second collection, Night Angler, won the James Laughlin Award; and his debut, Revising the Storm, received the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. A recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Porter Fund Literary Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Davis has also been awarded fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Whiting Foundation for his involvement with The Prison Story Project, which strives to empower incarcerated women and men to tell their own stories through writing. He currently lives in the Ozarks, where he teaches for the University of Arkansas. Raised by the Pacific Northwest, Davis also serves as core faculty for The Rainier Writing Workshop and as Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.
Hiba Tahir is a YA author and graduate of the University of Arkansas MFA, where she received the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund, the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship, and the James T. Whitehead Award. She is a 2020 recipient of an Artists 360 Grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance and a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council.
Kristin Entler was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at 6 months old, and first came out as LGBT+ several years after her diabetes diagnosis at 12 years old. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for NELLE, as Access Coordinator for Open Mouth Literary Center, and lives with her service-dog, Azzie, whose name is short for the Greek God of Medicine. Entler can be found in publications such as The Bitter Southerner, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Porter House Review, and BOOTH among others, as well as on twitter/x @findmycure.
Peter Mason is a Bi+ poet, a finalist for the 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and a recipient of a 2019 Artists 360 Grant from the Mid-America Arts Alliance. His work has been published in AGNI, Ninth Letter, Booth, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, The Journal, Poetry Magazine, and others. He is originally from Rochester, New York, earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and a BA from SUNY Fredonia. Pete is an assistant poetry editor of Copihue Poetry, has served as the development director of Open Mouth Literary Center, and assistant poetry editor and development director of the Arkansas International. He is the assistant director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Minnesota.
EVENT HEADER IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Photo of the featured reader outlined with a white line and displayed over a light blue background. Beneath the photo are the words “Open Mouth Presents: Our Final Reading” and the names of the featured poets: “Brody Parrish Craig, C.D. Eskilson, Geffrey Davis, Hiba Tahir, Kristin Entler, and Peter Mason”. Availability of sign language interpretation is indicated by the presence of an icon showing two hands signing in the bottom left corner.