Saturday September 27 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Hajar Hussaini is a poet and translator. Disbound (University of Iowa Press, 2022) is her debut poetry collection. She received a 2024 Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature for her translation of the poetry collection Wounded Vita Nuda by Maral Taheri (Deep Vellum, 2026) and a 2025 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Khosraw Mani’s novel, Death and His Brother (Syracuse University Press, 2026). Hussaini has won fellowships from the MacDowell and Baldwin for the Arts, as well as a 2023 Carol Anne Donahue Poetry Prize from Russell Sage College and a faculty development grant from Skidmore College, where she is an assistant teaching professor of English. Alongside Matthew Klane and Amie Zimmerman, she co-curates the Salon Salvage reading series in Troy, NY. Her writings and translations have appeared in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Annulet, and Asymptote, anthologized in Rumi: Roaming and Daedalus, and translated into Slovak by Terézia Klasová for Revue Prostor.

Jamie Perez is the author of the chapbook There Were Rivers Before There Were People (Big Lucks, 2016), and his work has appeared in various magazine online and in print. In 2020, along with Adam Good, he founded STATIONS, a publisher of creative gaming tools and resources. Together with Adam, Rob Turpin and others, he created and published An Infinity of Ships(2025). Jamie lives and believes in Baltimore.

Saturday May 17 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Elizabeth Willis is the author of Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theatre, activism, and film. Her other books of poetry include Alive (New York Review Books, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Address; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; The Human Abstract; and the artist’s book Spectral Evidence . She also writes about the intersection of art and labor and edited the volume Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Beth Joselow is the author of eight books and chapbooks of poems, the most recent being Someone Is Awake All Night (2024). She has often collaborated with visual artists, notably Pablo Makov of Kharkiv, Ukraine, and the late Dennis O’Neil of Alexandria, VA. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including American Poetry Review, Gargoyle, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Boston Review and New American Writing. She is the author of Writing Without The Muse, a popular book of writing exercises. She lives in Silver Spring, MD.

Saturday April 26 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Holly Melgard is the author Fetal Position (Roof 2021), named one of “Artforum’s Best of 2021,” and Read Me: Selected Works (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), which surveys her poems, short stories, and critical essays. Prior to this, she co-edited and designed Troll Thread Press for over a decade, a dual release print-on-demand + free .pdf platform, where she self-published ten other books, including several co-authored with Joey Yearous-Algozin. Her work has appeared in Best American Anthology of Experimental Writing, BOMB Magazine, and the German journal Merkur among other places. She lives in Brooklyn where she designs books and teaches writing.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of seven poetry books, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021)  and the newly released Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press 2024.). Her poems have appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Slowdown podcast and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. An Assistant Teaching Professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, she first published in Hanging Loose Magazine as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.

Joshua Smith is the author of By (Non Plus Ultra, 2021). His work appears in publications like Yalobusha Review, Word For/Word, and TIMBER and has been exhibited at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop and Harvard University. For more, visit jsmith.bio.

Saturday March 29 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. She is the author of the chapbooks I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), and Things I Have Made a Fiction, which was recently the winner of the Oversound Chapbook Prize. Her first full-length book, Caetano, will be out with the Elephants in 2025, and her translation of Roberta Iannamico's Many Poems will be out with The Song Cave later this year.

Matthew Gordon is a poet and artist based in the Washington DC area. His work has been published in numerous publications including Mirage #4/Period(ical), Personal Space (Vallejo) and theplaidreview. His visual art has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery and other venues.

Saturday February 22 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Vanessa Saunders is a professor of practice at Loyola University New Orleans. Her feminist, experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize with Fiction Collective 2 and was published by University of Alabama Press. Her writing has appeared in Writer's Digest, Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Passages North, The Writer’s Chronicle, and [PANK] among others.

K. Lorraine Graham is a poet, diviner and mixed media artist inspired by everyday life and family history. She makes a mix of abstract and representational pieces that evoke introspection and self-analysis. She is the author of The Rest Is Censored (Bloof Books) and Terminal Humming (Edge Books), and an artist book of drawings called Semiotic Squares (Primary Writing). Her work has been featured at the Kreeger Museum, Stable Arts, and But, Also. She lives in Washington, D.C. Follow her on instagram @klorrainegraham.

Saturday January 25 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Aditi Machado's third volume of poetry, Material Witness, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in October 2024. Her other works include the poetry collections Emporium (Nightboat, 2020) and Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017), a translation from the French of Farid Tali’s novel Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016), the essay pamphlet The End (Ugly Duckling, 2020); and several poetry chapbooks. Machado’s writing appears in journals like BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, Lana Turner, Volt, Western Humanities Review, and Jacket2, among others.

Bianca Rae Messinger is a poet and translator living and working in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of the chapbooks “The Love of God” (Inpatient Press, 2016) and “parallel bars” (Center for Book Arts, 2021) and translator of “In the Jungle There is Much to DO” [comunidad del sur [mauricio gatti], Berlin Biennale, 2020] among others. Her book pleasureis amiracle is out in January 2025 from Nightboat.

Christopher Kondrich is a poet and writer whose third book, Tread Upon, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2026. He is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series, Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019, and as a finalist for The Believer Book Award, as well as Contrapuntal (Parlor Press, 2013). He is also the co-editor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming January 2025). His poetry and essays appear widely in such venues as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review.

Saturday December 14 * 7pm * Free / donations * RSVP

FORGET WHY GROUP READING AND CELEBRATION

Event is free - donations welcome!

Join us for a celebration of the Forget Why poetry series. We are about to turn two years old! So it’s kind of a birthday party too. Poems will be read, drinks will be drunk, snacks will be et. Bring the beverage of your choice if you like, as well as any snacks to share. All are welcome!

Friday November 15 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Chris Nealon teaches in the English Department at Johns Hopkins, and lives in Washington, DC. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Heteronomy (Edge Books) and The Shore (Wave Books), which was a finalist for the 2020 National Critics’ Book Circle Award. His latest volume is All About You.

Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. His new book, Wrong Heaven Again, is available from Birds, LLC. He is also the author of General Motors, Valu-Plus, Old News, and several chapbooks. Recent poems have appeared in Prolit, Wax Nine Journal, and Windfall Room. Eckes has worked as an adjunct professor at numerous institutions and as a labor organizer in education. With Kim Gek Lin Short, he runs Radiator Press.

Saturday October 19 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Thea Brown is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in River Styx, Oversound, LitHub, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.

Julie Carr’s most recent books are Underscore; Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West; Real Life: An Installation; Climate, co-written with Lisa Olstein; and the essay collection, Someone Shot My Book. She lives in Denver where she co-founded and helps to run Counterpath and teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Saturday September 28 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Robert Fitterman is the author of 15 books of poetry. His most recent book, Creve Coeur, is a long poem that has just been published with Winter Editions (Fall 2024). Other titles include: This Window Makes Me Feel (Ugly Duckling Presse), No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Ugly Duckling Presse), Nevermind (Wonder Books) and Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books). He is the founding member of the artists-poets collective Collective Task http://collectivetask.magnetberg.de/. He lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.

LB Bender lives and works in Baltimore. Past publications include Parking Garage (theartofeveryone.com), Whale Box (Publishing Genius), and inclusion in The i.e. Reader (Narrow House). LB will offer a setting-specific work at Forget Why.

Saturday May 11 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator(Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science(Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their fifth book, Negative Money, is available now. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland. Their new chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018) and The Awful Truth (Golias Books 2017). They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams, art, and love have taken.

Saturday April 20 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Chris Mason is a Baltimore poet and songwriter. He is a member of two musical groups, Old Songs, who translate Archaic Greek poetry and put it to music, and The Tinklers. Poetry books: Poems of a Doggy (pod, 1977), Hum Who Hiccup (Narrowhouse, 2011), Something Something Morning (Blabbermouth,2020), and Of Rare Earths (forthcoming from Uncollected Press). Accompanying Chris will be Bill Engstrand (upright bass), currently a PhD student in Literature and Film at Morgan State University. He is currently working on a short film structured around the poems of Langston Hughes.

Ward Tietz is a visual poet and word artist best known for his installations and performances using large three-dimensional letters and words. Working in a variety of media, from sculpture to works on paper, he has exhibited and performed his work in galleries, festivals, art centers and museums in the United Sates and Europe since the late 1980s. Ward’s current work includes Hg-The Liquid, a book of rubrical visual poetry published by 1913 Press. He has taught in Europe and the United States, locally at Georgetown, from 2002-2020.

Saturday March 9 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Doug Lang, poet, teacher, and friend, exerted an influence on art and poetry that is impossible to exaggerate. Thousands of students at the Corcoran College of Art and Design learned directly from Doug that poetry and writing are open and accessible. Poets, especially in the greater Washington DC area, revered Doug for his humor, wit, innovation, and knowledge. Like James Joyce and Dublin, Doug never really left Swansea and his beloved Swans, even though he lived most of his life in DC. Doug died in November of 2022.

Friends and former students will gather at Rhizome for a reading to celebrate his life, poetry, and friendship. Please join us. Seats are limited.

Saturday February 17 * 7pm * $10-20 * TICKETS

Rod Smith is the author of Touché (Wave, 2015), Deed (U. Iowa, 2007), Music or Honesty (Roof, 2003), and The Good House (Spectacular Books, 2001). He edits the journal Aerial, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. He has taught at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, The Maryland Institute College of Art, and The Corcoran College of Art + Design. Smith edited The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley (U. Cal Press, 2014) with Kaplan Harris and Peter Baker.

Cathy Eisenhower lives and works as a psychotherapist in Washington, DC, and is the author of Language of the Dog-heads (Phylum 2001), clearing without reversal (Edge 2008), would with and (Roof 2009), distance decay (Ugly Duckling 2015), and animalitos (Primary Writing 2017). She has translated the selected poems of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi and co-curates a reading series at Rhizome DC. Her work has appeared in The Recluse, Aufgabe, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence.

Leslie Bumstead is the author of Cipher/Civilian (Edge Books 2005). Her work has appeared in Open Letters, Boog City, Hotel Amerika, West Wind Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Rhizome DC and in Maryland prisons.

Saturday December 9 * 6-10pm

FORGET WHY GROUP READING AND CELEBRATION

Join us for a celebration of the Forget Why poetry series. We are about to turn one year old! So it’s kind of a birthday party too. Poems will be read, drinks will be drunk, snacks will be et. Bring the beverage of your choice if you like, as well as any snacks to share.  Poets reading include Rod Smith, Sarah Sohn, Ryan Walker, Magus Magnus, Quincéy Xavier, and more! Event is free - donations welcome!

Saturday November 18 * 7pm * TICKETS

Paul Killebrew was born in 1978 in Nashville, Tennessee. His newest book is a double book, Impersonal Rainbow and The Bisexual Purge, out from Canarium in October 2023. His previous books, all from Canarium, are Flowers, Ethical Consciousness, and To Literally You. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Chia-Lun Chang is the author of Prescribee (2022), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, An Alien Well-Tamed and One Day We Become Whites. She has received support from Jerome Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tofte Lake Center, Poets House, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council among others. Chia-Lun teaches contemporary Taiwanese poetry and fiction at the Brooklyn Public Library. Born and raised in New Taipei City, Taiwan, she lives in Brooklyn.

Melissa Dickey is the author of three books of poetry: Dragons and The Lily Will (from Rescue Press) and Ordinary Entanglement, now available from Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Her poems and essays have been published in jubilat, Interim, the Laurel Review, the Spectacle, and Bennington Review, among other publications. Originally from New Orleans, she’s earned degrees from the University of Washington and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she teaches high school English and parents her four children.

Saturday October 14 * 3pm * TICKETS

Ken Jacobs is a poet living in DC. He is the author of Sooner (Phylum Press, 2009) and unmet (Primary Writing Books, 2015), and he’s built digital projects available at deegeep.com that invite collaboration with other poets.

poet, writer, and teacher, erica kaufman, is the author of three books of poetry: POST CLASSIC, INSTANT CLASSIC (both from Roof Books), and censory impulse (Factory School). she is co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974.  recent poems can be found in Ursula and e-flux. kaufman's prose, focused on contemporary feminist poetics and pedagogy, appears in: The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein; The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times; Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies; Reading Experimental Writing; and The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. ). in collaboration with the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, kaufman co-coordinates the Teacher Resource Center for Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, a course offered each fall as a MOOC (massive online open course). she is the director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking where she is also Writer-in-Residence. 

Saturday September 9 * 3pm * TICKETS

The Forget Why Reading Series brings together poets who question, play with, and derange their poetic inheritance, at times defying categorization as "poetry."

Kristen Gallagher is the author of three books: 85% True / minor ecologies (Skeleton Man 2017), Grand Central (Troll Thread 2016), and We Are Here (Truck Books 2011). Recent work appears in Peach Mag, The Baffler, and Air/Light. A 2021 collaboration with Human Scale, "hs341: 85% True/minor ecologies," an infinitely generative audio piece using sounds of Florida, is available through the Human Scale app.

Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. With his wife, Elizabeth Bryant, Taylor curates the Green Way Reading Series at People’s Book in Takoma Park.

Thursday June 29 * 7 pm * RSVP

Forget Why Poetry Series presents… Joe Hall is a Buffalo-based writer and reading series curator. His five books of poetry include Fugue & Strike (2023) and Someone’s Utopia (2018). He has performed and delivered talks nationally at universities, living rooms, squats, and rivers. Danika Stegeman LeMay’s work has appeared in APARTMENT, Blue Arrangements, CLOAK, Ethel Zine, Leavings, and Word for/ Word, among other places. Danika’s debut collection of poems, Pilot (2020), was published by Spork Press. substantive.material is a work of epiancestral process[ing] with quincéy.xavier and Sarah Bitamazire.

Saturday June 3 * 7 pm * RSVP

Forget Why Poetry Series presents… Phyllis Rosenzweig was a curator for many years at the Hirshhorn Museum. She co- published the poetry journal, Primary Writing with Diane Ward from 1995 to 2008 and currently edits Primary Writing Books. Sarah Sohn (she/her) is Co-Director of the Braiding Seeds Fellowship. Sarah has worked on small vegetable farms on and off since she was a teenager and has had the joy of working with hundreds of brilliant beginning farmers since 2015. Sarah is Korean American and grew up in Michigan. Susan M. Schultz grew up mostly in northern Virginia, and has lived in Hawai`i since 1990. She is author of several books of poetry and poetic prose, most recently _I Want to Write an Honest Sentence_ (Talisman) and _Lilith Walks_ (BlazeVox).

Friday April 21 * 7pm * RSVP

Forget Why Poetry Series presents… Warren Longmire is a writer, technologist and an educator from the bad part of North Philadelphia. He is a former co-editor of Apiary Magazine, a board member for Blue Stoop and has taught at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Matthew Klane has an MA in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Alexandra Jacobs is a student usually found at St. John’s College. She lives in a little jar, she writes poetry upon her little jar walls.

Friday April 14 * 7 pm * RSVP

Justin Marks’ books are, If This Should Reach You in Time (Barrelhouse Books, 2022) The Comedown, (Publishing Genius Press, 2021), You’re Going to Miss Me When You’re Bored, (Barrelhouse Books, 2014) and A Million in Prizes (New Issues, 2009). He is a co-founder of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press, and lives in New York City with his family.

Ryan Walker’s in Florida when he wrote this. He pronounces it Floridia in his head. He lives in Washington, DC. I’m thinking about how it might be upsetting to people when I’m genuinely curious about them and don’t pressure them to experience things like I do. That respect implies a world of restraint and ambiguity, I suppose. People are sometimes afraid of that world. Ryan is smug about negative capability.

Saturday March 18 * 7pm * TICKETS

Chris Nealon teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of three volumes of poetry from Edge Books (The Joyous Age, Plummet and Heteronomy), as well as The Shore, published by Wave Books, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Critics’ Book Circle Award. Another volume, All About You, will be out from Wave in 2024. He’s also working on a little book of poems called Channel S. 

Rod Smith is the author of Touché (Wave, 2015), Deed (U. Iowa, 2007), Music or Honesty (Roof, 2003), and The Good House (Spectacular Books, 2001). He edits the journal Aerial, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. He has taught at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, The Maryland Institute College of Art, and The Corcoran College of Art + Design. Smith edited The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley (U. Cal Press, 2014) with Kaplan Harris and Peter Baker.

Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer, editor and archivist. She is the author of Utopia Pipe Dream Memory (ugly duckling presse) as well as seven chapbooks, most recently My Midwinter Poem (clones go home). More info at annagw.com / @anna.as.metaphor

Saturday February 11 * 7pm * MASKS REQUIRED * TICKETS

From Baltimore, Lynne Dreyer has lived in the DC area for last 50 years. She began writing in 1970, encouraged by Rudd Fleming at the University of Maryland, and, over the years, was supported by so many about writing even when not writing.

hannah baer is a writer and therapist based in New York. Her first book is the memoir trans girl suicide museum.

Thursday February 9 * 7pm * TICKETS

Good Actors is a one-woman performance of the poet Sommer Browning’s third poetry collection, Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). It is funny, moving, irreverent, sexy, and funny (again). It explores the boundarylessness of genre but also our human roles—where do our roles and performances end and “real life” begin? How do we transition between art and life when life itself is a creative act? The text is grounded in everyday life and centers subjects such as divorce, motherhood, loss, and sexuality all filtered through popular culture and a wry sense of humor. The performance is directed and produced by Aaron Angello and features bold, vibrant animations created specifically for the text by filmmaker Kelly Sears.

Saturday January 14 * 7pm * TICKETS

Kamal Rahim Tanner Tourgee (he/him/his) is a writer, professor and multimedia artist who creates public art, murals, installations, digital video, and sound art. He has been accepted to prestigious artist residencies including MASS MoCA, Washington Project for the Arts, and he was a PBS American Documentary POV Spark African Interactive Art Residency Finalist. His work has been exhibited at Transformer Gallery, School 33 Art Center, the Katherine and Tom Belk Visual Arts Center, ICA Baltimore, the Harn Museum of Art, and has been screened in numerous exhibitions and festivals. As a descendent of enslaved Africans, Free Blacks, and Cherokee Indians, his creative practice is informed by cultural, social, and technological literacies of the Black Radical Tradition. His research interests interrogate identity and community formation in local, national, and diasporic contexts focusing on Blackness, experimental storytelling, resistance movements, and technological structures. Kamal is an electronic musician, DJ and composer via his stage name KAMAL ERRORR. Follow him on Instagram @kamalerrorr and on SoundCloud here.

Amy Eisner teaches creative writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), helping visual artists develop as poets and integrate writing into their art practices. Her poetry, noted by Joshua Corey for its "beauty and strife," has appeared in American Literary Review, Fence, Poet Lore and dozens of other journals, as well as a few galleries. Her poems have been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and a foray into book arts was acquired by the University of Richmond library.