On Tuesday, November 4, at 6:30 p.m., the Liberal Arts Studio at the Art Academy of Cincinnati will host poet, teacher, editor, and independent publisher Anselm Berrigan for a free public reading. The session will be opened by student Nyla Davies (junior), and after the featured reader there will be a brief open mic for anyone who would like to share their work. The proposal is straightforward: listen to poems, read them aloud, and sustain a simple exchange, with coffee and light refreshments. Berrigan will have copies of his books available for purchase and signing.

The event is part of the Creative Writing Reading Series and is supported by the Department of Liberal Arts, the AAC chapter of Poems While You Wait, and the Collaborative Learning Studio. The organizers favor an austere format designed for a mixed audience: students in the arts and humanities, faculty, and readers who want to gauge the distance between the page and the voice. No grand promises: the point is to reserve time for listening and response, with the open mic as a practice of community.

Berrigan arrives with a recognizable body of work in contemporary English-language poetry—recent titles, sustained editorial work, university teaching—that makes him a pertinent guest for an art campus. His reading speaks to the neighborhood’s cultural life and to the school’s interest in showing processes as well as results. In that spirit, Davies’s role as opener underscores the crossing of training and scene: a student in dialogue with a working author under the same lights.

For the public, the plan is clear: come in, listen, and if you wish to read, read; have a coffee, buy a book, and take it signed. Those who leave the room will have witnessed a plain, sufficient gesture: poetry spoken in the present, without theatrical apparatus and with the courtesy of letting more than one voice be heard.

Bios

Anselm Berrigan

Poet, teacher, editor, and independent publisher. Author of numerous books of poetry, including Don’t Forget to Love Me (Wave Books, 2024), Pregrets (Black Square Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody (Wave Books, 2018), and Come In Alone. He edited What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009) and co-authored the collaborative books Loading (with Jonathan Allen) and Skasers (with John Coletti). He served as poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail (2008–2023) and, with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan, co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005) and Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2011; University of California Press). More recently he co-edited Get The Money! Collected Prose of Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022). A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published books by Hoa Nguyen, Steve Carey, Adam DeGraff, and Brendan Lorber. He was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church (2003–2007), where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series. He teaches writing at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College, and for many years was Co-Chair in Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts MFA program (Bard). His honors include an Individual Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2017), a Process Space Residency from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2015), a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency (2014), a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Poetry (2007), and three grants from the Fund for Poetry.

Nyla Davies

Junior majoring in Illustration at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, with a minor in Painting and Drawing. In recent work, they explore crossings between text and image: “drafting paintings, painting poetry—and, also, the other way around.” Davies will open the reading as part of the Creative Writing Reading Series and join the exchange with the audience.

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