2025 DC Poet Project - Honoring Reuben Jackson and Kathi Wolfe

This is the second event in Day Eight’s 2025 DC Poet Project series. Each event includes about thirty minutes of poetry by the featured poets, and equal time for reading by open mic participants, for the opportunity to win a $250 open mic prize, judged by the featured poets.

Anyone can perform in the open mic; Only DC residents are eligible to win the cash prize.

The DC Poet Project is a poetry series and open-to-all poetry competition culminating in publication of a new book of poetry by a DC author. Each event includes reading by featured poets and an open mic. And at each series event the featured poets select one open mic participant to be the winner, awarding a $250 cash prize and invite to compete in the culminating event to win a $1,000 book contract.

The 2025 DC Poet Project series is curated by Regie Cabico and hosted by Aaron Holmes and is produced by Day Eight through the support of individual donors and support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

ABOUT THE FEATURED POETS

This event features poets that were friends with Kathi Wolfe and/or Reuben Jackson, a pair of exceptional DC poets that passed in 2024.

Gregory Luce, editor and editorial board chair of the Mid-Atlantic Review, is the author of the chapbooks Signs of Small Grace and Drinking Weather , and the collection Memory and Desire. His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, and in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press) and Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing). He was the 2014 winner of the Larry Neal Writers Award, awarded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Joseph Ross is the author of five books of poetry: Crushed & Crowned (2023), Raising King, Ache, Gospel of Dust and Meeting Bone Man. His poems appear in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, Xavier Review, Poet Lore, The Langston Hughes Review, and The Los Angeles Times. He teaches English and Creative Writing and writes regularly at JosephRoss.net.

Serena M. Agusto-Cox, an editor of the Mid-Atlantic Review, is a Suffolk University graduate who writes more vigorously than she did in her college poetry seminars. Her day job continues to feed the starving artist, and her poems can be read in Beginnings Magazine, LYNX, Muse Apprentice Guild, The Harrow, Poems Niederngasse, Avocet, Pedestal Magazine, and Mothers Always Write, among others. An essay also appears in H.L. Hix’s Made Priceless and at Modern Creative Life, as does a Q&A on book marketing through blogs in Midge Raymond’s Everyday Book Marketing. She also runs the book review blog, Savvy Verse & Wit, and is the founder of Poetic Book Tours.

THE CULMINATING EVENT OF THE 2025 DC POET PROJECT: SUNDAY MAY 4

​​The 2025 Poet Project series will culminate in person at a special reading Sunday, May 4 at 2:00 pm, including the open mic winners as selected at the four prior events. At the end of the reading, attendees will vote to select one poet to receive a $1,000 book contract.

PAST WINNERS OF THE DC POET PROJECT

2024 DC Poet Project winner Amuchechukwu Nwafor, author of

2023 DC Poet Project winner Brandon Douglas, author of

2022 DC Poet Project winner Dominic McDonald, author of

2021 DC Poet Project winner Jenn Koiter, author of

2019 DC Poet Project winner Kevin Wiggins, author of

2018 DC Poet Project winner John Johnson, author of

2017 DC Poet Project winner Susan Meehan, author of

Host or Publisher Day Eight