Celebrating the 2024 Poetry Contest Finalists with Little Patuxent Review

In celebration of the finalists of the 2024 Poetry Contest with the Enoch Pratt Free Library and , join us for an evening of readings by the three finalists, Marc A. Drexler, Kate Powell Shine, and Preet Bhela, as well as Little Patuxent Review contributor xochi quetzali cartland. Little Patuxent Review lead editor Sarah Berger will host.

Marc A. Drexler, the winner of the 2024 Poetry Contest, has lived in Maryland most of his life since moving from Iowa to attend Johns Hopkins University. His poem "Baltimore, 1977" appears in Maryland in Poetry (2020). He has a poem on some Arlington Transit (ART) buses in Virginia as part of their Moving Words project through September 2024. He has been published by Split This Rock and The Mid-Atlantic Review. Marc has also served as a Community Teaching Assistant for the Coursera online course Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo), led by Al Filreis out of UPenn. He worked for many years at the Maryland Food Co-op on the University of Maryland, College Park campus and believes strongly in collectivism.

Kate Powell Shine, a 2024 Poetry Contest finalist, has had poems published in magazines including Fuselit, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Gargoyle. She is active in numerous local literary communities including those at Montgomery College, Montgomery County Public Libraries, and the Eastern Shore Writers Association. She lives in Montgomery Village with her husband, John Shine.

Preet Bhela, a 2024 Poetry Contest finalist, is a Punjabi-American poet currently in his second year of the University of Maryland’s MFA program, where he also teaches and conducts workshops with undergraduates. He is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he grew up working at his family’s restaurant. His work inspects the self as a site of interruption and how language can embody such breaks and disruptions, especially through a diasporic lens.

xochi quetzali cartland, a contributor to Little Patuxent Review's summer issue, is a queer and Latina poet, seamstress, and transformative justice practitioner. She graduated from Brown University with a BA in literary arts and has since moved to Washington, D.C., where they are rekindling their love of trees and learning to make pretzels. Her work has been featured in Apple in the Dark and Common Ground Review, as well as supported by National Arts Strategies and Brooklyn Poets.

Sarah Berger, a contest judge, is a classical singer, writer, editor, teacher, maker, and editor of the Little Patuxent Review. She’s a graduate of Oberlin College, the Peabody Conservatory, and the University of Baltimore’s MFA program in creative writing and publishing arts. She now teaches at UB in the undergraduate writing program. She’s working on a forthcoming novel about music students. Links to Sarah’s published writing, music, and other projects can be found at orangesloth.com and on social media @OrangeSlothArt.

• Doors will open to registered attendees at 5:30 pm.
• Free parking vouchers are available to program attendees who park at the Franklin Street Garage (15 W. Franklin Street) after 4pm. Ask Pratt event staff for your parking voucher prior to or after the program.
• For more information about this event, email [email protected].

Host or Publisher Enoch Pratt Free Library