Words out Loud Spoken Word/Poetry

Reuben Jackson and Gary Hotham are featured readers. Also includes open mic and literary trivia quiz.

Reuben Jackson is an archivist with the University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. From 2013 until 2018, he was host of Friday Night Jazz on Vermont Public Radio and has been an archivist and creator with the Smithsonian Institution’s Duke Ellington Collection. His poems have been published in over 40 anthologies. Scattered Clouds, a collection of previously published and new poems will be published in October by Alan Squire Press. His music reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Jazz Times, Downbeat, Jazziz, the Jazz Journalists Association website, and on NPR’s All Things Considered. He has taught poetry at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland and to high school students in Burlington, Vermont.

Gary Hotham has been crafting English language haiku for over 50 years. Echoing T.S. Eliot, he finds writing haiku to be a way to “devour any kind of experience” and fulfill the poet’s “task of trying to find the verbal equivalents for states of mind and feeling.” He first discovered the genre in a high school English class and has yet to recover from the challenge. He grew up in northern Maine, currently resides in Maryland and has traveled and lived in Japan, Germany, England, and Texas. His work has appeared in journals, chapbooks and anthologies. His major collections of haiku: Breath Marks: Haiku to Read in the Dark (1999), Spilled Milk: Haiku Destinies (2010), and Stone’s Throw: Promises of Mere Words (2016).