Sunday February 18th (4pm) THE HOT L POETS SERIES continues with poets Ned Balbo & @Lauren Russell. The reading includes an open mic so bring a poem (1 poem, 3 min. or less). The reading series is co-sponsored by Baltimore Poets Theatre & Smartish Pace. Please note, we’re at Bird in Hand Charles Village.

Ned Balbo’s six books include The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize) and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), both published in 2019. The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems received the Donald Justice Prize and the 2012 Poets’ Prize. A Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, he taught forever at Loyola U. Maryland before accepting a visiting faculty gig in Iowa State University’s MFA program in creative writing and environment. He’s received four Maryland Arts Council poetry grants and an NEA translation grant. His partner is poet and essayist Jane Satterfield. Visit https://nedbalbo.com for poems and https://nedsdemos.bandcamp.com for music.

Lauren Russell is a poet and writer in hybrid forms. She is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award for “venturesome, interdisciplinary work,” and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Her next book, A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2024 as part of the Multiverse series. Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from Millay Arts, Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, Foglifter, Gulf Coast, the anthology Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and lives in Baltimore with her cats, Cat Jeoffry and Lady Day.