30 Poets in 30 Days

Welcome to Larksong's celebration of National Poetry Month - 30 Poets in 30 Days! This annual event brings together poets from all over the country with poets local to Nebraska. This year we asked Larksong members first to fill half the reading slots, and the other half we filled during a visit to the Associated Writing Program's Conference and Book Fair in Seattle. Most of those were new acquaintances and this event was their introduction to Larksong. The mix of new and familiar allowed us to reach in this one program one of the primary objectives of all the programs we offer: to bring new voices to Nebraska audiences and help send Nebraska voices out into the world. Nebraska has a rich and active literary life and this 30 Poets program is designed to celebrate it.

We recorded 30 poets for this event - 31 actually, there's a bonus double reading on April 6! We reached them via Zoom, visited them in their homes, found them at work, at the airport, and at the Associated Writing Program Conference in Seattle. The poems range from heartbreaking to laugh-out-loud funny, and like such emotions in life they are all mixed up in this list, so you never know what you'll find when you click on a link and start watching. Be ready for anything!

The link to each daily reading will become "live" at 3 am CST on the date they're listed. To watch, click on the 30 Poets 30 Day thumbnail image. The video will play in your browser. Once live the link will stay live so you can watch as many times as you like. You can also find them on YouTube on Larksong's channel under 30 Poets in 30 Days. There's even a playlist!

A big thank you to all the poets involved!

Enjoy!

April 13 - Brian S. Ellis

Thursday, April 13, 2023

We're off to Seattle now for the Associated Writing Program's Annual Conference for the next 15 readings! Things got crazy, as they often do at AWP, as evidenced here by the number of creative ways we strung together the introduction to each poet. Never mind that, just enjoy these fabulous readings!

Brian S. Ellis was the first poet we recorded at the Book Fair. We weren't quite sure how it all would work, and there were/are some technical/user issues, but the poets were all fabulous! We found Brian at the University of Hell Press table, and honestly, how could we not stop and ask questions? Was it really a coincidence that he was the 13th poet we recorded this year? We'll leave that up to you to decide. His was the first book we bought at the book fair even though we vowed we wouldn't buy so many books this year. We heard him read, loved it, and thought, oh what the hell, just this one. A book doesn't weight that much.(Reader, we did not stop at one.)

A poet, storyteller, teacher, and prose writer based in Portland since 2010, Ellis is a story producer for Back Fence PDX, a live storytelling series, and teaches writing at Portland Community College. His books include Often Go Awry and American Dust Revisited, both published by University of Hell Press; and Yesterday Won’t Goodbye and Uncontrolled Experiments in Freedom published by Write Bloody Press. You know you want to know more about presses with names like that, so I went ahead and provided links. Just click on their names.