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. October’s event will feature Diane Suess, Kari Gunter-Seymour, and Quartez Harris.

Diane Suess

Diane Seuss’s most recent collection is frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) and is the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Seuss taught in the creative writing program at Kalamazoo College for many years, and has been a visiting professor at Colorado College, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis. She was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.

frank: sonnets

Kari Gunter-Seymour

Kari Gunter-Seymour is Ohio’s Poet Laureate, a 9th generation Appalachian, the author of three books of poetry, editor of nine anthologies, a 2021 recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship Award, is an Ohio Creative Aging Teaching Artist and the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project. She is an artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts and a 2021-22 Pillars of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022) and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award.

Alone in the House of My Heart

Quartez Harris

Quartez Harris is a poet from Springfield, Ohio and the Ohio Poetry Association’s 2021 Poet of the Year. Harris is the author of We Made It To School Alive, a full-length collection of poems published by Twelve Arts Press, and Nothing, But Skin, a poetry collection published in 2014 by Writing Knights Press. We Made It to School Alive was inspired by his work as a teacher and gives voice to the experiences of the children he works with every day who deal with structural barriers, intergenerational poverty, educational negligence and more. He is the first recipient of the Barbara Smith Writer-In-Resident at Twelve Literary Arts and a 2020 Baldwin House Fellow and his poetry and ideas have been featured in The Plain Dealer, Ideastream, City Club of Cleveland and the Vindicator. In 2021, Harris garnered an acclaimed literary agent who has built a staggering roster of visionary writers. His works in progress are two picture books and a young-adult novel in verse.

We Made It To School Alive

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