ONE ART’s June 2026 Reading for Pride Month

ONE ART’s June 2026 Reading for Pride Month

Date: Sunday, June 7
Time: 2pm Eastern

Duration: 2 hours

Featured Poets: Julie Weiss, Ren Wilding, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Moudi Sbeity, Abby E Murray, Kai Coggin

>> Register Here <<

(donations appreciated)

~ About Our Featured Readers ~

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. She is the author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Her work has been published in TIME MagazinePOETRY, Academy of American Poets, American Poetry Review, Best of the Net, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Coggin is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE and 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.  www.kaicoggin.com

Nicole Caruso Garcia (she/her) is the author of OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press), which received the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Crab Orchard ReviewLightMezzo CamminONE ARTPlumeRattleRHINO, and elsewhere. Her poetry has received the Willow Review Award, won a Best New Poets honor, and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an associate poetry editor at Able Muse and served as an executive board member at the annual conference, Poetry by the Sea. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest and teach writing to military officers.

Moudi Sbeity is a Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative educator. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. His memoir, Habibi Means Beloved (University of Utah Press), and poetry collection, Alhamdulillah Anyway (Fernwood Press), are set to be published in the fall of 2026.

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty (Kelsay Books, 2021), her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II (Bottlecap Press, 2023 and 2024). Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 2025 by Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears in Chestnut Review, MER, ONE ART, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Variant Lit, among others, and is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, and SWWIM. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

Ren Wilding (they/them) is a trans, queer, neurodivergent poet. They are the author of Trans Artifacts: Bones Between My Teeth (Porkbelly Press, 2026) and Trans Archeology (Lily Poetry Review, 2027). Their work appears in Braving the Body (Harbor Editions), Nixes Mate, ONE ART, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. They were a finalist for Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Prize, are a two-time Pushcart nominee, and are co-curator of the Words Like Blades reading series. They hold an MA in Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Missouri and live in St. Louis.

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

  1. Kai Coggin
  2. Alison Luterman
  3. Donna Hilbert
  4. Betsy Mars
  5. John Amen
  6. Susan Vespoli
  7. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  8. Tina Em
  9. Kim Addonizio
  10. Molly Fisk
  11. Joseph Fasano
  12. Terri Kirby Erickson
  13. Robbi Nester
  14. James Crews
  15. Abby E. Murray
  16. Allison Blevins
  17. Erin Murphy
  18. john compton
  19. Dana Henry Martin
  20. Alison Hurwitz
  21. Moudi Sbeity
  22. Dick Westheimer
  23. James Feichthaler
  24. Karen Paul Holmes
  25. Naomi Shihab Nye

Note: For poets who published multiple times in ONE ART, in 2025, we are linking to the most-read curated work.

ONE ART’s Nominations for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards

ONE ART’s Nominations for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards

Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW

Abby E. Murray – I Can’t Find My Gender

Julie Weiss – Dear Daughter, 

Sean Glatch – Having a Gay Awakening at the Elm Grove Public Pool

Hannah Tennant-Moore – Other People Explain My Sexuality to Me

*

Learn more about the Monarch Queer Literary Awards.

ONE ART’s 2026 Best of the Net Nominations

ONE ART’s 2026 Best of the Net Nominations   

Allison Blevins – Earlier, Jane Kenyon

Kai Coggin – I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW

Abby E. Murray – I Can’t Find My Gender

Alison Luterman – To a Mother I Know

Joseph Fasano – To the Insurance Executive Who Denied My Heart Procedure

Dana Henry Martin – Window Strike at Highlands Behavioral Health

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.)

+++++

~ 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

I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW by Kai Coggin

I AM MY OWN COUNTRY NOW
        November 6th, 2024
I am my own country now.
I am seated at the very bottom of myself
at this time of highs and lows,
ebbs and flows,
moving through colors of emotion
with no wind at my back, waiting to see
if I can again pull myself up from the depths of defeat.
Here I am, borderless inside myself,
surrounded by a country that no longer dreams it can dream.
I am my own country now,
patriotic only for my own quiet tenderness,
a citizen of loss
and finding again a reason to hold on.
The capital city of my heart sparks
a little flame on the hilltop of my soft body,
and I am trying to find again a reason to stand
up for the vision of freedom I held for us all,
to light the way somehow through
all the impending unabridged darkness.
I am my own country now.
My neighbors pushed a lotus back down into the mud
when we were so close to the surface,
when we were at the cusp of breakthrough,
when we could almost see her iridescent petals
reflecting the sunlit stars blushing with sweetness—
now lost in a poisoned swamp of collectively stepping backward.
I am my own country now.
I have taken the stars from the old flag,
and hung them from my eyelashes—
left the red, left the stripes, left the scars,
left the blue empty night square there
as some long-lost pinpoint of progress.
I am my own country now,
and here, the shores of my hands
are slowly opening again from the fists of this,
knowing the shapes of new truths—
I am the only homeland I know.
No one can govern my life.
No man owns my body, my choices.
I am free I am free I am free
even if I die
in that freedom.
I am my own country now, an individual revolution.
I threshold my collarbones
to greet first the small tender ones,
the vulnerable green,
the silent lichen and supple mosses,
the sapling sycamore and autumn redbud,
the black-capped chickadee, wood thrush, and squirrels,
the swirling colors of my koi fish rippling outward their dances,
my two year old niece Luca
smiling down a yellow slide into my arms,
my gaggle of teenagers I bring into the forest
leaving poems as breadcrumbs home,
my sweet little black dog frail with age
who wakes me at dawn to remember the sun rises,
my wife, too, defiant with hope, fiery with love
building her new citizens.
We populate ourselves with those
who can hold us and who we can hold,
landlocked together in a country all our own.
We chop firewood together,
two axes splitting hardwood for winter
whatever cold and bitter may come.
We cold-plunge naked into our backyard pond
fresh and freezing again as torrential rains answered drought.
We dig our fingers into cold dark earth
and drop red tulip bulbs into the soil, blanket them up again
with the promise of spring, wrap ourselves too in that promise.
We will stay close to our land, to the trees,
to our small circles of love.
I will stay close to the poets, hold our words as Light.
We are our own country now.
*
Link to audio recording.
*
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 Weekly, SOLSTICE, 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