ONE ART’s March Reading — Featured Poets: Joanne Leva, Tresha Faye Haefner, Jennifer Browne, Ethel Rackin, Dana Knott, Allison Blevins

~ The ONE ART Reading Series ~

ONE ART’s March 2025 Reading! 

Sunday, March 2 — 2pm Eastern (via Zoom)

Tickets are FREE or Donation

>>> Tickets Available Here <<<

Featured Poets: Joanne Leva, Tresha Faye Haefner, Jennifer Browne, Ethel Rackin, Dana Knott, Allison Blevins

Joanne Leva, author of Eve Heads Back and Eve Would Know (Kelsay Books) and an advocate for creative writing and community service. Joanne is founder and executive director of the Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Program (MCPL), directed by Chad Frame (who is an upcoming Featured Poet!! So, I hope you’ll plan to tune in to ONE ART’s future readings). She also oversees the new Montgomery County PA Youth Poet Laureate program (YPL), directed by Evan Wang. Leva founded and has coordinated the Forgotten Voices Poetry Group and workshop, the first Saturday of every month from the Indian Valley Public Library, in Telford, for over 34 years. 

Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Peace is a Haiku Song, 50 Over Fifty, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Rag Queen Periodical, Mad Poet’s Review, Bucks County Writer, Transcendent Visions, among others. Her poem, God Walks into a Bar, was featured in a Philadelphia Calligraphers Society Exhibit and Poetry Reading and companion publication entitled, Scripta. Her poem, Looking Back on the Mountain, was featured in an exhibition and companion publication entitled, Making Magic: Beauty in Word and Image, at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA.

Ask me about the Caesura Poetry Festival & Retreat!

The MCPL is a program of the Indian Valley Arts Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit corporation. Please consider supporting our efforts with a donation.

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Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of five chapbooks and four collections. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com. If you would like to support the Blevins family during their current health crisis, you can donate to their Meal Train or purchase an item off their wishlist.

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Tresha Faye Haefner is an award-winning poet, performer, educator and general facilitator of the fun times. Her work has been widely published and garnered several awards, including the Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and the Pangea Prize. Her first book, When the Moon Had Antlers (Pine Row Press, 2024) was a finalist for the Glass Lyre Poetry Prize. She is best described as an eco-poet, travel-poet, and performance poet. She writes words for the stage, page, coffee shop, words for sitting under a tree alone, and words for reading to someone you love while rowing them down a river towards dawn.

In addition to writing her own poems about nature and other mysteries, her most important role is to help others feel safe and inspired to write work of their own. Most importantly, she is founder of The Poetry Salon, an online learning community where poets meet to share inspiration, education and support as they write together and cheer one another on! You can get new information, updates and invitations to events at The Poetry Salon by joining The Poetry Salon on Substack at ThePoetrySalonStack.Substack.com.

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Dana Knott’s writing has recently appeared in The Selkie, Moss Puppy, Minerva Rising, Cosmic Daffodil, and Dust Poetry Magazine. Her micro chapbook “Funeral Flowers” was published by Rinky Dink Press in 2024. Currently, she works as an academic library director in Ohio, and is the editor of tiny wren lit, which publishes micro poetry and micro chapbooks. Check out her profile on Chill Subs: https://www.chillsubs.com/user/dana.a.knott.

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Jennifer Browne falls in love easily with other people’s dogs. She is the author of American Crow (Beltway Editions, 2024) and the poetry chapbooks Before: After (Pure Sleeze Press, 2025), In a Period of Absence, a Lake (Origami Poems Project, 2025), whisper song (tiny wren publishing, 2023) and The Salt of the Geologic World (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Her work has recently appeared in Poets for Science, Humana Obscura, Trailer Park Quarterly, and One Sentence Poems. Find her in Frostburg, MD and her poems at linktr.ee/jenniferabrowne.

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Ethel Rackin is the author of four books of poetry: The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013); Go On (Parlor Press, 2016), a National Jewish Book Award finalist; Evening (Furniture Press, 2017); and In Time (Word Works Books, May 2025). In addition, she is the author of the text Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing (Broadview Press, 2022).

Her collaborative lyric sequence, “Soledad,” written with Elizabeth Savage, was awarded the 2016 Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred by Elizabeth Robinson, and another collaborative sequence, “Silent e,” is included in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry ReviewColorado Review, Columbia Poetry ReviewKenyon ReviewNew England ReviewPoetry DailyVerse DailyVolt, and other journals.

She earned her MFA from Bard College and her PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. A MacDowell fellow, she has taught at Penn State Brandywine, Haverford College, and Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, where she is a professor of English.

Burdock by Jennifer Browne

Burdock

The house cat swishes
her tail through burdock,
its insistent cling a tool
distributing seed. Back
home, she grooms burrs,
tail twitching, cast bracts
rasp the blanket. I have
latched onto you. In that
persistence, what spines
am I causing you to carry
back into the softness
of your bed. There’s no
growing ground, just a
warm, dislodging mouth
sleeking yourself clean.

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Jennifer Browne falls in love easily with other people’s dogs. Her chapbooks—Whisper Song (tiny wren publishing) and The Salt of the Geologic World (Bottlecap Features)—range landscapes of her fascinations, which include landscapes. Her poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in the Poem for Cleveland anthology, the Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak 15th Anniversary Volume, Steel Jackdaw, Gargoyle, South Broadway Ghost Society, and Humana Obscura. She lives in Frostburg, MD.

Three Poems by Jennifer Browne

Subterranean

Just off the highway, under seeming-
solid ground, tourists float a lighted
pool in glass-bottomed boats, sight
stocked rainbows. The billboards
call it a lost sea, and I start
to think of worlds at the edges
of our vision, begin to feel the sea
within me pulse the shore
of continents I thought were fixed
but are breaking into new form, now,
our body colliding with itself.
And within you, what new land
rises, what’s the fee to pole my way
beyond sightseeing toward a place
that, falling away, is being made?

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On Seeing ‘Input’ (2004), Athens, Ohio

The flashing danger of copperheads
in this sunken concrete poem is just
a blinking light Morsing out a message
I can’t read. They say if a thing that’s close
had been a snake, it’d have bitten you,
but I’ve seen some I’d nearly stepped on,
their silent regard unfanged, and here you
are, watching, your eyes all dark spectacle.
In the face of such shimmer, who would
check to see what shape your pupils take?

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Latinate

It’s spring. I had forgotten
how quickly etymology leads
to kissing. Seeing the mouth
embedded in ōsculārī,
I’m moved to pronounce
with more-open lips, to want
the grammar of your tongue,
present active infinitive.

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Jennifer Browne is a poet, professor, literary arts center director, and hiker from Frostburg, Maryland. Her poems have recently been accepted by Right Hand Pointing, Quarto, Trailer Park Quarterly, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the tiny wren anthology All Poems are Ghosts.