State’s Poets Laureate Reading with Lauren Camp & Justin Hamm

Missouri Poet Laureate Justin Hamm is the author of five books of poetry—O Death, Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007–2021, The Inheritance, American Ephemeral, and Lessons in Ruin—and a book of photographs, Midwestern. He is also the creator of Poet Baseball Cards and founding editor of the museum of americana. A 2024 and 2022 Woody Guthrie Poet, 2020 Missouri Arts Council Featured Artist, 2018 River Styx International Poetry Prize finalist, and winner of the 2014 Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize, Hamm performed “The American Midwest: a Story in Poems” at TEDx Oshkosh in 2022. In 2019, his poem “Goodbye, Sancho Panza” was studied by approximately 50,000 students worldwide through the World Scholar’s Cup curriculum. His work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, Sugar House Review, Verse Daily, Southern Indiana Review, New Poetry from the Midwest, and many other publications.
As New Mexico Poet Laureate (2022-25), Lauren Camp created theNew Mexico Epic Poem Project, a community-centered, crowd-sourced initiative designed to help people in rural and arts-underserved communities express themselves. Undertaken in partnership with New Mexico Arts, the Project has reached 25 of New Mexico’s 33 counties. Letterpress broadsides of each community poem will be printed, disseminated across the state, and exhibited at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe.
She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute, and has been awarded a Dorset Prize and a New Mexico Book Award. Other honors include finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Housatonic Book Award, Big Other Book Award, and Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. She has been writer-in-residence at Lowell Observatory, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Hedgebrook, Denver Botanic Gardens, Storyknife, and The Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center.
Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Nation, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, Missouri Review, and Poem-a-Day. Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French, and Spanish.