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ONE ART’s August 2025 Reading

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

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, August 17 at 2pm Eastern.

The official event is expected to run approximately 1-hour.

After the reading, please consider sticking around for Community Time discussion with our Featured Poets.

About Our Featured Poets:

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Among her publications are a memoir, a children’s book and three poetry chapbooks. She was twice named a Georgia Author of the Year in the poetry category. Julia offers private instruction online in addition to her full load of college teaching.

Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee and is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Fall, 2025. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been passionate about writing since age seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, explores healing through unsent letters. She is currently seeking a literary agent and publisher for Pieces of Us, along with six chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections.

She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.

Her work has recently appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Her debut poetry collection, Myths in the Feed: Poems of Performance, Pain & Perseverance, was just released from Crying Heart Press!

Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of four poetry collections: All Possible Histories (Riot in Your Throat), Helen of Troy is High AF (Harbor Editions), Letdown (White Pine Press), and Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market (Codhill Press). Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Southern Review, Willow Springs and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College, edits the Rise Up Review, and advocates for neurodiversity and the decentering of the cis/het white hegemony. More at soniagreenfield.com.

Three Poems by Lailah Shima

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The root of free,
as in not in bondage
may mean love, but hurtling
down I-94, my mind spins in freefall.
All day, no time passes. Sky stays white
as smoke and I remember black ice,
shattered ribs. I almost don’t believe
humans continue
hurling our soft bodies forward.
Still, on these Wisconsin hills
the gravest hazards lurk in my head:
if I alone edge past a ledge
who would notice? My daughter
glances up from her phone,
says, this world of winter looks fake.
White crystals feather every line
every needle of pine, what’s real
too wondrous to fathom. Fiery eyes
gleam through silvered lids, pink hair
as her head tips onto my shoulder.
A sedge of cranes trumpets
over the freeway, hundreds upon hundreds,
still north, so late. Soaring, unworried.
I roll down my window to listen.
*
Intima
All year I hear in my vessels
susurrations like summer dusk.
But now as dawn seeps into day
I can’t parse threads of song—
breath upon breath, moth wings
against wings, shushing edges
of leaves— or sound the depth
of silence holding us, or fathom
how close we are to everything
dying.
*
Hope Is a Discipline
      Hope is a discipline, an ongoing commitment to action.
      On a daily basis, I decide to begin anew. —Mariame Kaba
While crows perch on sunflowers.
      As we slide seeded loaves onto hearth bricks.
When my midwife proclaims me complete.
      Before my neonate son’s lungs stop.
As we plant his placenta under a cedar sapling.
      While my daughter anchors me in her world.
Until biopsy results blare from my phone.
      When we see another phone-video of another killing.
Before wildfire reaches my friend’s mountain town.
      Beyond space my excised organs open.
After a third scan, a fourth infusion.
      When a neighbor brings jasmine tea and honey.
Meanwhile, the woodcock’s sky dance.
      Beyond the twilit sky, dark moon.
Between our hands, heat.
      While we reach. While we hold.
While we face forward.
*
Lailah Shima is a death doula who writes and walks among the lakes of Madison, Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in CALYX, Terrain, and Anti-Heroin Chic, as well as in The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy (ed. Jam es Crews). She is an MFA candidate at Pacific University.