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. November’s event will feature Jessica Jacobs, Nickole Brown, and Alan Holmes and Michael Cody. Register now!

Jessica Jacobs
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards, and a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell, American Fiction, and Julie Suk Book Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock-climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and now serves as the Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is at work on a collection of poems exploring the Book of Genesis.

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Nickole Brown
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with her wife Jessica Jacobs, and they regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative.

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Alan Holmes & Michael Cody

Thomas Alan Holmes, a literature professor at East Tennessee State University, has most recently co-edited The Fire That Breaks: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poetic Legacies with Daniel Westover (Clemson, 2020) as well as the “Appalachian Theatre” issue of The Iron Mountain Review. Alan has published in such journals as Valparaiso Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, The North American Review, Appalachian Journal, and Still: The Journal. His first poetry collection, In the Backhoe’s Shadow, is scheduled for an early 2022 release from Iris Press.

Michael Amos Cody is the author of the novel Gabriel’s Songbook (2017) and A Twilight Reel: Stories (2021). His short fiction and poems have appeared in Tampa Review, Yemassee, The Chaffin Journal, The Southern Poetry Anthology (Vols. VI and VII), Howl, Pisgah Review, Short Story, Potpourri, and Fury. He teaches American literature before 1900, Native American literature, and mythology in the Department of Literature & Language at East Tennessee State University.

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