ONE ART’s February 2026 Reading

ONE ART’s February 2026 Reading

Sunday, February 1

Time: 2:00pm Eastern
Duration: 2-hours
Featured Readers: Kim Stafford, Kari Gunter-Seymour, J.D. Isip, Todd Davis, Grant Clauser

Tickets are FREE!

(donations appreciated)

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Featured Readers

Grant Clauser’s latest book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. He is the author of five previous books, including Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven and Reckless Constellations. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry ReviewGreensboro ReviewKenyon ReviewSouthern Review and anthologies including Keystone Poetry and The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia. His books and poems have won numerous awards including the 2023 Verse Daily Poem Prize. He’s an editor for a national media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania. More at grantclauser.com

Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry—Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems; Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball,and co-edited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly ReviewThe Hudson Review, Iowa ReviewNorth American Review, Missouri Review, OrionPrairie SchoonerThe Southern Review, Southern Humanities ReviewWestern Humanities Review, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and soon-to-be professor emeritus of Environmental Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University.

J.D. Isip is a Pushcart and Bet of the Net nominated writer and professor of English, originally from Southern California, and currently living and teaching in South Texas. His full-length collections of poetry and creative nonfiction include Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015), Kissing the Wound, and Reluctant Prophets (both from Moon Tide Press, 2023 and 2025). He is currently editing The American Pop Culture Almanac, forthcoming for America’s 250th (Summer 2026) from Moon Tide Press.

Kari Gunter-Seymour (she/her) is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) winner of the IPPY Bronze, NYC Big Book and Feathered Quill Awards. She is the Executive Director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak. Her work has been featured in a variety of journals and the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times.

karigunterseymourpoet.com

I: karigunterseymour

Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He taught writing at Lewis & Clark College for forty years before retiring and becoming Professor Emeritus in 2020. He is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. He has written about his poet father in Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, and his book Having Everything Right: Essays of Place won a special citation for excellence from the Western States Book Award. His most recent poetry collections are As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024) and A Proclamation for Peace Translated for the World (Little Infinities, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term. In a call to writers everywhere, he has said, “In our time is a great thing not yet done. It is the marriage of Woody Guthrie’s gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of songs, poems, blessings, manifestos, and stories by those with voice for those with need.”

Four Poems by Todd Davis

A Very Small History

Fire burns inside the stones
unearthed with a plow. Long dead
is the horse that dragged them
to the cellar hole where the farmer’s sons
stacked a foundation that still clings
to the hillside and the hearth
and chimney where smoke curls
into night. He tells the chair, the one
his wife sat in each morning
as they had coffee, that he’s gathered
this wood from a windthrow
pitched over in a spring storm.
After running the saw all afternoon,
silence is a comfort, and the warmth
of this old flickering calms his mind.
Above the eaves cold descends, helping
to cure five cord he stacked in October.
The moon is absent. The dispassionate stars
provide little light to count the rings.

*

Angry Elegy

All summer long the forest burns
and the stream above and below frays
like a broken thread.

In the deepest water along the dam
trout settle like silt, just enough cold
to survive beneath ash.

With each step a cloud of cremated bone:
elk and deer who couldn’t outrun fire,
bear engulfed in a den of flame.

Through the open furnace door
wind blows down the valley
and the tyrant says to rake the gold,

to pry it from the teeth
of our fallen dead.

*

Orphaned

Sky descending
toward black.

Last pink
at the brink
of the western-
most mountain.

A star
brightening.

A mother’s voice.

Like the sound
of water
at the seep
before it continues
the work
of wearing away
the gap
in the stone.

Saying
Lodestar.

Saying
This is how
you find
your way
home.

*

The Crabber’s Mother Tells Him about His Birth

Your face looking up
through the water, breaking
the water’s surface,
and your eyes opening,
the sky reflected there,
and also the limbs of trees
that hang over the river,
and the flying bodies
of heron and osprey,
the wing-beats of migrating
thrushes, and the water
washing around
your cheekbones,
the water dripping
from your chin
as you open your mouth
to cry for the first time,
dark hair matted to the skull,
current dragging you
gracefully out
into the estuary,
floating your small body
to the coastal town
where you will be born.

*

Todd Davis is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, most recently Native Species, Winterkill, and In the Kingdom of the Ditch, all published by Michigan State University Press. His seventh book, Coffin Honey, will be published by Michigan State in February 2022. He has won the Midwest Book Award, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Orion, and Poetry Northwest. He teaches environmental studies, American literature, and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College. http://www.todddavispoet.com/