THE HOT L POETS SERIES continues with poetsTanya Olson & Lia Purpura! The reading series is co-sponsored by Smartish Pace & Baltimore Poets Theater. The reading includes the two featured poets along with an open mic so bring a poem (1 poem, 3 min. or less). Please note: we're moving indoors until the weather warms and this reading is at Bird in Hand.

Click here to RSVP!

Click here to browse Tanya's work!

Click here to browse Lia's work!

Tanya Olson lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and is a Senior Lecturer in English at UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County). Her first book, Boyishly, was published by YesYes Books in 2013 and received a 2014 American Book Award. Her second book, Stay, was released By YesYes Books in 2019. She has received the Discovery/Boston Review prize and was named a 2011 Lambda Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her poem 54 Prince was chosen for inclusion in Best American Poems 2015 by Sherman Alexie.

Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Smartish Pace, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD, where she is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has taught in the Rainier Writing Workshop’s MFA program, at Breadloaf Writers Conference, The University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program and at conferences, workshops, and graduate programs throughout the country. Her newest collection of poems is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin) and her latest collection of essays is All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande Books).

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