A Celebration of Love Poetry Reading

Kelli Russell Agodon is a bi/queer poet and editor from the Pacific Northwest. Her next book, Accidental Devotions, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2026. Her book Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) was a finalist in the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize in Poetry. She cofounded Two Sylvias Press and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. She cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2019). He has received a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University. 

Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue, NYC. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Jacques J. Rancourt was raised in Maine. His poems have appeared or will appear in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets 2014, among other places. He has received a Wallace Stegner fellowship from Stanford University, a Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a residency from the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He lives in Oakland, California.

Jaz Sufi (she/hers) is a mixed race Iranian American poet and arts educator. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Muzzle, and elsewhere. She is a National Poetry Slam finalist and has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Watering Hole, and New York University, where she received her MFA. She splits her time between the Bay Area, CA, and Brooklyn, NY, with her dog, Apollo. 

Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage, which received the 1999 Lambda Literary Award, and Voluntary Servitude published by Graywolf Press in 2004. He is the recipient of two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a 2002 Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant and the 2003 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship. Individual poems, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the Paris Review, Yale Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Fence and elsewhere. He has taught at Stanford, San Francisco State University, Barnard College, Ohio University and Sarah Lawrence College and is now teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Kit Freeman (she/her) is in the last year of PhD in English at Southern Methodist University. She is also a Senior Reader of Poetry at Ploughshares.