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 Tiffany Williams, Marcus Jackson, and Ruth Awad. Register here!

Tiffany Williams
Tiffany Williams is coal miner’s daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter from Eastern Kentucky, who currently lives in Nashville, where she writes songs and fiction. She received the 2011 Jean Ritchie Fellowship for Appalachian Writing and 2017 Denny C. Plattner Award for fiction. Her first album, When You Go, was released in January 2019 and reached No. 15 on the North American College and Community Radio Folk Chart and No.12 on the Folk DJ Chart. Her second EP, I’ll Be Back Soon, was released in February 2021.

Buy music by tiffany williams!

Marcus Jackson
Marcus Jackson studied poetry in NYU’s graduate creative writing program and as a Cave Canem fellow. His poems have appeared in such publications as The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. His second book of poems, entitled Pardon My Heart (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books), was released in 2018. Of Pardon My Heart, Jeff Gordinier for The New York Times writes, “Jackson’s collection confirms the arrival of a thrilling new voice in American poetry, one whose writing, on page after page, has the fullness and glow of a jubilee.” Jackson lives with his wife and child in Columbus, Ohio, and teaches in the MFA programs at Ohio State and Queens University of Charlotte.

Buy pardon my heart by marcus jackson!

Ruth Awad
Ruth Awad is the Lebanese-American author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2020). She is a 2021 NEA Poetry Fellow, the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and she won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio.

Buy set to a music wildfire by ruth awad!

Some links to recent work:

• The Believer: “We don’t talk about children until we do”
• VIDA Review: “Origin” and “Men Compliment Me”
• Poetry Magazine: “The Years of Water & Light”
• Cordite Poetry Review: “Years We Lived Close to the Bone”
• Wildness: “Moral Inventory”

REGISTER HERE!