Other People’s Poems

Join us at the store for the third installment of this wonderful new poetry open mic and reading series at 7pm on January 18, 2025! Featured readers will be Woogee Bae, Paul Hlava Ceballos, and Patrick Milian.

Synopsis

Other People’s Poems is a poetry series centered on readers of other people’s poems. Sometimes these readers are writers too, but often they are also lovers of poetry who can’t get enough of those lines that evoke the sense of the exclamation O!. They are no-I’m-not-a-poets who secretly scribble their innermost thoughts in the most delicate of deckled journals. This series features these readers and the poems they love.

This series, hosted at Open Books, will consist of an Opening Reading track, in which any reader can sign up to 5 minutes of someone else’s poems, followed by the Round Robin track, in which the two hosts, Ally Ang and Cody Stetzel, invite 3-4 writers to select and read poems from one of the other readers or their favorite poets for 10-15 minutes.

At Other People's Poems events, there are low lights and snacks and always a reason to leave one’s winter depression pit, to warm the freeze one has acquired in many cities, and a reason to come together for the thing we love, which is reading, and poetry, and a hot cup of meaning.

Featured Readers

Woogee Bae writes poems and edits at Snail Trail Press. Her writings have appeared in Afternoon Visitor, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. Find her @qodnrl.

Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s First Book Award, also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Christina Sharpe. He has fellowships from CantoMundo and the Poets House, and has been featured on the Poetry Magazine Podcast and The Stranger. He is Poetry Editor of the Seattle Met and practices echocardiography.

Patrick Milian is a queer, Cuban American writer and teacher based in Seattle. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington, where he was also a Joff Hanauer Fellow at the Simpson Center for the Humanities. He’s tenured faculty in English at Green River College. He is the author of The Unquiet Country, from Entre Ríos Books, and the chapbook Pornographies, from Greying Ghost. His poetry has appeared in periodicals like Poetry Magazine, Gulf Coast, Mid-American Review, and Denver Quarterly. His prose has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Solstice, Spectrum, Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere. His musical collaborations with the composer Emerson Eads are published by Northstar Music.