Spoken & Heard is a seasonal series of literary events hosted by Kari Gunter-Seymour, Poet Laureate of Ohio, featuring award-winning authors, poets and singer/songwriters from across the country. March’s event will feature Carter Sickels and Jessica Salfia.

Carter Sickels
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press). His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury) was a 2013 Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His writing appears in various publications, including The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Guernica, Joyland, and Catapult. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Jessica Salfia
Jessica Salfia is teacher, writer, and educational activist. Her writing has appeared in the Charleston-Gazette Mail, West Virginia Living Magazine’s Blog, the WVCTE Best Practices Blog, multiple volumes of the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and the Washington Post. Her poem, “Rootbound” was selected for the 2018 Women of Appalachia Project, and she was the winner of 2016 and 2019 West Virginia Fiction Competitions. She is the co-editor of the book 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike out now from Belt Publishing, and most recently her poem “First Lines of Emails I Received While Quarantining” was featured in several publications and media outlets and anthologized in The Covid Arts Project. Jessica is the co-director of the West Virginia Council of Teachers of English, and currently is a teacher at Spring Mills High School in Martinsburg, West Virginia where she teaches Advanced Placement Language and Composition and Creative Writing and advises the Literary and Art magazine. When she’s not teaching, writing, or advocating for West Virginia and public education, you’ll find her in the woods with her three kids or paddling down a creek somewhere.