And it’s a wrap! My first Round Robin reading is in the books — and the books that were part of it, including mine, will always be connected in my mind now.
The Lana Hechtman Ayers, publisher of Concrete Wolf Press (which published my second chapbook, Accommodations), came up with the concept for a Round Robin Reading Series about a year ago, and approached me and two other poets whose work I was unfamiliar with about participating. Our reading, held June 22 via Zoom, was the third such reading. None of us had done anything like this, and I think all of us enjoyed it immensely.
The concept is for three random poets, selected by Lana, to read each others’ new collections and think of poems in those collections that speak to their own poems. Specifically, we were asked to come up with two poems from each other poet’s book and pair them with poems of our own that felt to us as if they might be in conversation with the others. The other two poets who participated in the reading were Tina Schumann, whose book Boneyard Heresies, came out earlier this year and won the Moon City Press book contest, and Dorinda Wegener, whose book Four Fields was released last year from Trio House Press. I had briefly met Tina at the Wandering Aengus/Trail to Table Press booth at AWP this past March; I’d stopped by the booth to thank the publisher for making The Grief Committee Minutes a finalist in the Wandering Aengus Book Award competition in 2023, and Tina, the group’s poetry editor, happened to be working. We ended up exchanging books, but I had not read any of those poems at the time Lana approached me, so her work was completely new to me. I was also unfamiliar with Dorinda’s work, although I had read that it was an Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize finalist. I knew I was soon going to be in the virtual company of two excellent poets, although I admit I was a little nervous about how the reading would unfold.
Turns out, I didn’t need to be; everything went wonderfully! We had maybe 30 people listening in, and making comments in the chat. The best thing about this was that I feel like I have discovered two very special poets now whose work I will be closely following in the future.
Interested in taking a listen? Good news, Lana recorded it! Here’s the link.