Please join us on December 9th when our featured poets will be E. Ethelbert Miller, Diana Smith Bolton, and W. Luther Jett, upstairs at the Gaithersburg Library, 2-4 pm. The reading is hosted by Lucinda Marshall and will be followed by an Open Mic.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He is the author of several collections of poetry and two memoirs. For fourteen years Miller has been the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine published in the United States. In April 2015, Miller was inducted into the Washington, DC Hall of Fame. In 2016, he received the AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and the DC Mayor’s Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. Miller currently serves on the faculty at the University of Houston/Victoria and hosts the weekly morning radio show On the Margin which airs on WPFW-FM 89.3. The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, published in 2016 by Willow Books, is a comprehensive collection that represents over 40 years of his career as a poet. Miller’s most recent book is If God Invented Baseball, published by City Point Press.
Diana Smith Bolton has published two poetry chapbooks. Her debut chapbook, Just Universes, was selected as the 2016 Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series winner by L+S Press. Her second chapbook, A Compass for My Bones, was published by Main Street Rag Press (2017). Bolton’s work traces connections between the physical and the geographical, from intimacy to distance. The poems in A Compass for My Bones explore personal networks of relationships, family, and identity. The founding editor of District Lit, Bolton lives and works near Washington, DC.
W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals, such as The GW Review, Beltway, Innisfree, Potomac Review, and Little Patuxent Review as well as several anthologies, including My Cruel Invention and Proud to Be. His poetry performance piece, Flying to America, debuted at the 2009 Capital Fringe Festival in Washington D.C. He has been a featured reader at many D.C. area venues. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father, released by Finishing Line Press in the fall of 2015, and Our Situation, released by Prolific Press, summer 2018.
DiVerse Gaithersburg 