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 February 15, 2025! Featured readers will be Cass Garison, Constance Hansen & nanya jhingran!

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

Cass Garison is a poet & artist whose first chapbook, "Beauty Exasperated," is available through Common Meter Press. They were a 2023-2024 Hugo House Fellow and have work published at Poets.org, in Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Foglifter, & others. Cass hosts an annual retreat for poets and artists working in all mediums. They also organize Threshold, a hybridized trans- & queer-centered poetic-performance art series in Seattle. More about them at CassGarison.com.

 

Constance Hansen's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in: Rhino Poetry, West Branch, Image Journal, Harvard Review Online, Four Way Review, The Cortland Review, Northwest Review, Vallum, and elsewhere. She is Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest and received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington. She lives with her family in Seattle, where she was born and raised.

 

nanya jhingran is a reader, teacher, poet, and editor from Lucknow, India, currently living in Seattle on unceded Duwamish and Coast Salish lands. She is a Tenure-Track Faculty member in English and Humanities at South Seattle College, serves as a mentor for the Seattle Youth Poetry Fellowship, and organizes the Critics at Large program at Poetry Northwest. She is a PhD Candidate in Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Washington where she also received an MFA in Poetry. Her writing is committed to the many absent-presences that share this world with us and can be found in Moss Literary, Poetry Northwest, Waxing, Canthius, The BOILER, and Seventh Wave, among others.