Other People’s Poems

New poetry open mic and reading series!

Join us at the store at 7pm on Saturday, October 26, 2024 for the inaugural event, featuring Rachel Edelman, Gabrielle Bates, and Luther Hughes.

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

Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet who writes into diasporic living. They are the author of Dear Memphis (River River Books, 2024), and their poems, essays, and epistles have appeared in West Branch, The Seventh Wave, Lilith, AGNI, Orion, and many other journals. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic, and pedagogical practice.

Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), a finalist for the 2024 Washington State Book Award and an NPR Best Book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves intermittently as visiting faculty for a variety of universities, arts organizations, and museums, including the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, and Ploughshares, among other venues.

Luther Hughes (they/them) is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (BOA Editions, 2022), listed as best books of 2022 in The New Yorker, and the chapbook, Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. They are the founder of Shade Literary Arts, an organization for queer writers of color, and cohosts The Poet Salon Podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat. Recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship and the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, they received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Their writing has been published in The Paris Review, Orion, American Poetry Review, and others. They’ve been featured in The Seattle Times, Forbes, Essence, KUOW Public Radio, and more. Luther lives in Seattle, where they were born and raised.