Come help ring in National Poetry Month with a special What The Universe Is! Readers Frank Paino and Robert Carr will be joined in conversation by fellow poet Nickole Brown, and all you have to do is register at bit.ly/WTUIPoetryMonth2024 to make sure you don’t miss it!
Frank Paino earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His fourth book, Dark Octaves, won the Longleaf Press Book Prize and is forthcoming (Winter 2024). His chapbook, Pietà, won the Jacar Press Chapbook Prize and was published in 2023. Frank has received a Pushcart Prize, The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in a variety of literary publications, including: Crab Orchard Review, Catamaran, North American Review, World Literature Today, Briar Cliff Review, Lake Effect, and a number of anthologies.
His website is: https://www.frankpaino.net
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published by Indolent Books, and two full-length collections published by 3: A Taos Press – The Unbuttoned Eye and The Heavy of Human Clouds. His poetry appears in many journals and magazines including the Greensboro Review, the Massachusetts Review and Shenandoah. Forthcoming collections include Phallus Sprouting Leaves (winner of the 2024 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series, Seven Kitchens Press) and Blue Memento, from Lily Poetry Review Books.
You can find Robert online at https://www.robertcarr.org/
Special guest Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems about her grandmother called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. In 2024, she’ll be the Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University, and she teaches every summer at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program. Currently, she’s the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2025.
Nickole’s website is https://www.nickolebrown.org/