ONE ART’s May 2025 Reading

We’re pleased to announce ONE ART’s May 2025 Reading!

The reading will be held on Sunday, May 4 at 2pm Eastern

We expect the event to run approximately 2 hours.

Featured Poets: Jennifer Mills Kerr, Terri Kirby Erickson, Dick Westheimer, Ann E. Michael, Kai Coggin

>>> Tickets available <<< (Free! Donations appreciated.)

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~ About Our Featured Readers ~

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. An East Coast native, she loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Northern California.​ After twenty years writing & publishing fiction, Jennifer has recently “come out” as a poet, thanks to supportive editors, teachers, & friends. You can connect with Jennifer & read her work at her website.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including her latest collection, Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have appeared in Only Poems, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Gasmius, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. She is a hospice volunteer, writing tutor, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at https://annemichael.blog/

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, AR, and a recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her project Sharing Tree Space. She is the author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Coggin is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, an Interchange Grant Fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.

Coggin was awarded the 2023 Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award for Visionary Service, and the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award for Arts in Education. She was twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year. Her fierce and tender poetry has been nominated nine times for The Pushcart Prize, and awarded Best of the Net in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Poets(.)org, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, Cultural WeeklySOLSTICE, About Place Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Editor-at-Large at both SWWIM and Terrain(.)org, Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. She lives with her wife in a peaceful valley, where they tend to wild ones and each other. www.kaicoggin.com

Tallahassee by Ann E. Michael

Tallahassee

You lived in a cinderblock duplex
like everyone else that part of town
flat roof beneath mossy oak
sidewalks yellow at pollen blow
loose trash along the curbs.
Your brother drove a new model
pickup everyone envied,
kept it real clean, never parked
on your street. He’d say forget
college, get a job, he’d buy you beer
and drop you at your door
the neighbor kids eyeing him like
some kind of celebrity. One time
he backed his truck over a kitten
didn’t hear you yelling stop
till it was too late and the poor thing
lay yowling, paralyzed, those kids
looking on with you still can’t say
what, maybe awe, on their faces.
Their dad jerked his thumb at Rick,
said, Finish it. Rick revved into
reverse, then roared off. You told
them you were sorry. Ain’t nothing
but a cat, said your neighbor,
they’s dozens nobody wants, we
can get another. You stood
on the scabby grass, once again
feeling you could do nothing right.

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Ann E. Michael lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, slightly west of where the Lehigh River meets the Delaware. Her most recent collection of poems is Barefoot Girls. Her next book, The Red Queen Hypothesis, will be published sometime in 2021. More info at http://www.annemichael.wordpress.com