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. September’s event will feature Philip J Metres, Crystal E Wilkinson, and Caitlin Kraus. Register here!

Philip J. Metres
Philip Metres has written ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon 2020), Sand Opera, and The Sound of Listening. Awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship, three Arab American Book Awards, and two NEAs, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015). His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Watson Foundation. He has been awarded the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the Hunt Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original.” His poems have appeared widely, in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Polish, Russian, and Tamil. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

This is a nugget about family background: Born in San Diego on July 4th, 1970, the son of a Lebanese American Vietnam Veteran and a ex-convent novitiate of Irish and German extraction, Philip Metres grew up outside Chicago, attended Loyola Academy and College of the Holy Cross, and spent the following year in Russia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship pursuing an independent project called “Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Relationship to Historical Change.” Since receiving a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University in 2001, Metres has written and translated over fifteen books and chapbooks.

BUY SHRAPNEL MAPS BY PHILIP METRES!

Crystal Wilkinson
Crystal Wilkinson, a USA Artist Fellow, is the award-winning author of The Birds of Opulence (winner of the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence), Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Nominated for the John Dos Passos Award, the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, she has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. Her fourth book Perfect Black is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky in August 2021. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Associate Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.

• Rockefeller Foundation USA Artist Fellowship 2020
• Finalist John Dos Passos Prize 2019
• Appalachian Heritage Writer’s Award 2019
• Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence 2016
• Judy Gaines Young Award 2017
• Weatherford Award in Fiction 2017
• Appalachian Book of the Year 2016
• Named Southerner of the Year by Southern Living Magazine 2016

  BUY ANY PERFECT BLACK BY CRYSTAL WILKINSON!

Caitlin Kraus
Originally from Columbus, OH, Caitlin Kraus is a singer/musician and songwriter living in Athens, OH. Kraus has performed her music solo and with a band over the past decade. In 2016, she released a self-titled 7″ record on label Keeled Scales based in Austin, TX where she lived for five years and, in 2020, she released her full-length album What Rises, primarily recorded at Peachfork Studios in Pomeroy, OH. When not writing music or performing, she spends time with her dogs, works in the mental health field as an outpatient counselor and music therapist for adults, and is an adjunct professor for Ohio University’s Music Therapy Department.

Buy caitlin kraus’ self titled record!

REGISTER HERE!