Other People's Poems ft. Mateo Bracken, Oliver Brickman, and Garfield Hillson
Other People’s Poems is a monthly poetry open mic and reading series that centers readers and lovers of poetry. Hosted by Ally Ang and Cody Stetzel at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, each event begins with an open mic in which any person can sign up to read 5 minutes of poetry written by someone else, and then three featured readers will each read 10-15 minutes of other people’s poems. This event is free and mask-required.
April’s featured readers:
Mateo Bracken is a poet, librettist, and actor who splits his time between Auburn and Seattle, Washington. He was the 2023-2024 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate and currently serves as the 2024-2026 Auburn Poet Laureate. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in the Gay & Lesbian Review, EchoX, The Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology, Abya Yala: Indigenous Connections in Latin America, Creative Colloquy, Bird Brains: A Lyrical Guide to the Birds of Washington State, and more. As a librettist in the Seattle Opera Creation Lab, he developed the twenty-minute chamber opera Blood Dawn of the Inti Sun in collaboration with composer Mina Pariseau. His first chapbook, Dear Spanish, was published in 2024 through Poetry Northwest and explores the languages of identity, heritage, and belonging. He is currently working on a manuscript about the settler colonial history of Auburn in verse.
Oliver Brickman is a queer Jewish writer and performer invested in liberatory futures and reckoning with ghosts. The winner of the Split This Rock Poetry Prize and a nationally recognized performer, they have received support from Hedgebrook, the Lambda Literary Foundation, Yiddish Book Center, 4Culture, and Artist Trust. A BOAAT Writers Fellow and Ken Warfel Fellow for Poetry in Community, recent work has appeared in Narrative, Adroit, The Indiana Review, and as part of On the Boards' Performance Lab. They are currently at work on a collection of poems interrogating transness and 19th century spirit photographs, and a memoir about collective organizing in Charlottesville, Virginia during the white nationalist rallies of 2017. Ollie holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and lives in Seattle, where they work in a library and teach writing to youth and adults.
Originally from South Florida, Garfield Hillson is a Black-Queer poet and educator working in Seattle. He believes in the beauty of words and the power of story-sharing. He believes in trauma-informed social justice healing and that art and education are the building blocks to achieve this. Garfield imagines being Black and Queer is nothing if not a study in silence. So he writes to reclaim the language that was stolen from him, to empower others, and to push imaginations to craft a better NOW!! Garfield is a Seattle Poetry Slam Grand Slam Champion (2015); a Rain City Slam Grand Slam Champion (2017); and a five-time Seattle Poetry Slam National Team Member (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). Garfield has appeared in Rising Up: A Queer Social Justice Play (2017); and Dear White People—Resistance (2018).
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