Other People’s Poems is an open mic and reading series centering readers and lovers of poetry. Hosted by Cody Stetzel and Ally Ang at Open Books: A Poem Emporium. Masks required
The August Other People’s Poems features readings by Ching-In Chen, Kalehua Kim, and Corinne Manning.
Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems; and Shiny City (forthcoming November 2025) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They work with Massage Parlor Organizing Project and are a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on the Governing Council of Seattle's Cultural Space Agency and on the board of Seattle City of Literature. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, Intercultural Leadership Institute and the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They have served as Pacific Northwest chapter co-lead for Kundiman and recently joined the national Kundiman board. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They currently teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell and serve as the poet laureate of Redmond, Washington.
Kalehua Kim is a poet living in the Pacific Northwest. Born of Hawaiian, Chinese, Filipino and Portuguese descent, her multicultural background informs much of her work. A 2023 winner of the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, she is currently pursuing an MFA through the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She is a Fellow with the Indigenous Nations Poets and her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, Calyx, and ‘Ōiwi, A Native Hawaiian Journal. As a recipient of the 2024 Trio House Press Editor’s Choice Prize, her first collection of poems, Mele, was released by Trio House in 2025.
Corinne Manning is the author of the acclaimed story collection We Had No Rules (arsenal pulp press 2020). Their essays and criticism have been published widely including The New York Times and Lux magazine. Corinne's vampire romance, The Treasure Maker, is forthcoming from Generous Press in 2026, and their retelling of Dante's Inferno, Dirty Joke, featuring Italian Americans in hell is forthcoming from Bunny Presse/Fonograph Editions in 2027.