An Evening with Three Acclaimed Poets to Celebrate National Poetry Month!

Join three award-winning poets—, , and —to celebrate their recently released collections during National Poetry Month. During this evening of readings and conversation, featured poetry includes Amit Majmudar’s , Hussain Ahmed’s , and Paula Lambert’s .

This is a free event. The recently released collection of each of the poets will be available at the event.

THE OHIO POETRY ASSOCIATION is Gramercy’s Community Partner for this program.

Poems inspired by the strong women in award-winning poet Amit Majmudar’s life, celebrating the influence and energy of the ones who nurtured him, loved him, and made possible his journey as person and poet. This marvelous collection opens with the practical wisdom and unforgettable wit of the poet’s grandmother, who said (among other things), “Turmeric can heal anything / but a broken heart” and “Read that to me at / my funeral, boy, right now my show is on.” From the foundation of the matriarchal, Majmudar turns to the impact of women as lovers and partners, exploring the contours of passionate, romantic, and married love; he and his wife are “two fireflies/ scooped out of the same evening” to meet in the jar where their constancy contains and sustains them. In the end, all this love transforms into the gift of language: Majmudar writes of how the Goddess in all her forms has charmed his life, giving rise to the creativity and personhood that allows him to seek and find his mother country in poetry. A remarkable work from a man celebrating the power of the feminine to shape us and define who we are.

Amit Majmudar is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently What He Did in Solitary, as well as an internationally acclaimed novelist and essayist. His work as a translator includes Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary. A diagnostic nuclear radiologist, he lives in Westerville, Ohio.

War and its reverberations propel people across the Nigerian landscape in Hussain Ahmed’s third collection. In Crossroad Mirror many poems begin after sundown—in quiet moments when the bounds between the past and the present, the living and the dead, blur. War and its aftershocks often form the backdrop for these scenes, though Ahmed’s verse rarely brings us to the battlefield itself. Instead, we hear the stories of refugees, civilian casualties, and ordinary soldiers trying to make sense of their circumstances. “There’s no vocabulary in the army—for grief, or death,” writes Ahmed. “Each door you exit, leads to another parade ground.” A group of soldiers wait out a rainstorm—and the war—together in a tent. Their families linger by the radio and listen for news. The “missing” loom as large as the dead. Tracing the threads of migration that war so often catalyzes, Crossroad Mirror takes us from grassland to cornfield to coastline and explores the role storytelling and spirituality play in leaving and grieving.

Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist and author of Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile and Blue Exodus. He is the winner of the 2024 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and the 2024 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, and his poems have been featured in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere.

Terms of Venery, the collective nouns used to denote a group of animals or birds, are reconsidered in this new collection of poems by Paula J. Lambert. Here, she confronts disasters of every kind-those ahead of us and those we might be forced to admit we've already been dealing with for decades. In Terms of Venery, Revised, the personal and the collective are ever intertwined, and ignoring any part of that "sacred singularity" can only do more damage. This, says Lambert, is the lesson we're sent here to grasp.

Paula J. Lambert has published four previous full-length poetry collections including As If This Did Not Happen Every Day (2024). A literary translator, she was awarded the 2021 PEN America – L’Engle Rahman Prize for Mentorship. Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the 2023 winner of the Slippery Elm Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Amy Lowell Prize. Lambert owns Full/Crescent Press, a small publisher of poetry books and broadsides, through which she has founded and supported numerous public readings and festivals that support the intersection of poetry and science, including the Sun & Moon Festival now hosted by the Ohio Poetry Association. She lives in Columbus with her husband, Dr. Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist.

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