OPEN MIC AND FEATURED POETRY SERIES: MANOR MILL

2029 MONKTON ROAD – MONKTON, MD – 21111

First Monday of each month. Doors open at 6:15 PM and readings start 6:30 PM up in The Loft. Hosted by Monkton playwright and poet Robert Bowie Jr. and British poet Mel Edden.

Each open mic night will also include readings from featured poets.

March 4’s featured poets are
James Allen Hall and Lauren Russell

JAMES ALLEN HALL
FEATURED POET – MARCH 4, 2024

James Allen Hall (he/they) is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Romantic Comedy, selected for the Levis Prize by Diane Seuss and published in 2023 by Four Way Books. Their first book of poems, Now You’re the Enemy, was published in 2008 by the University of Arkansas Press and won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Their second book, a collection of personal lyric essays titled I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Essay Collection Award and was published in 2017. 

Hall is also the recipient of awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. With Aaron Smith, James is the co-host of the popular poetry show Breaking Form: A Podcast of Poetry & Culture. They currently serve as an associate professor at Washington College and direct the Rose O’Neill Literary House. They can be found online at https://www.jamesallenhall.com, on Instagram as @freedverses, or on Twitter and Facebook @jamesallenhall.

LAUREN RUSSELL
FEATURED POET – MARCH 4, 2024

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 the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, 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