As part of the launch of a new journal, COAST|NoCOAST, I will be reading alongside Gretchen Frances Bennett, E. J. Koh, and Adrian Kien at the Seattle Art Museum on September 6, 2018, at 6:30 p.m.The reading is free and open to the public. Each writer will read next to a particular artwork or group of artworks in SAM's Big Picture Gallery (on the third floor). Learn more about the My Favorite Things reading.I'm so thrilled to be a part of the inaugural issue of COAST|NoCOAST, especially given just how much the fundamental premise of the journal aligns with my own drives as an artist. In their own words:

COAST|NoCOAST (previously Northside Review) is an annual print journal of poetry, poetics, and art with "offices" in Cincinnati, Ohio and Seattle, Washington. While our literary interests are diverse in form and content, we are looking for the bridges between the works we love. We publish COAST|NoCOAST as an interrogation of our aesthetics as well as an exploration of our regions' poetry and art. A portion of each issue is dedicated to the writers and artists of  Southwest Ohio and the Puget Sound. We seek work that is self-conscious (potentially experimental) in form and context (literary, historical, or otherwise).

As a writer from Louisville, Kentucky—which I consider both the Midwest and the South—living in Seattle, these two spaces inevitably collide in my work. What's more, I'm always experimenting with nonce forms. You could say that, in their imprint on the page, relatively few of my poems tend to resemble each other. That's because I'm just doing my best to find the right shape for each individual poem, with my primary goal being to find the form that best enables the sonic movement of the piece to come across to the reader. It's more motivated by sound than by any visual aesthetic.

Please come out and join me for this reading in such an incredible space — really a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me, and one that I am so thrilled about.