Matt Hohner: At The Edge Of A Thousand Years (Poetry Panel)
Kick off the month of May with a celebration of Baltimore poet Matt Hohner’s latest collection, At the Edge of a Thousand Years, which won the Jacar Press Full-length Competition in 2023! Three other beloved local poets will join Matt for a community reading: Jennifer Keith, Steven Leyva and Edgar Silex.
This event will take place on May 1st from 6-8 p.m. at The Ivy Bookshop. It is free and open to the public.
Books will be available for sale at the event, and we will have a pop-up bar from Bird in Hand, The Ivy’s sister store.
Matt Hohner was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado and is an assistant editor for poetry at The Loch Raven Review. His poetry has garnered numerous awards, including the 2019 Doolin Writers’ Weekend International Poetry Prize in Ireland, 2018 Sport Literate “Anything but Baseball” poetry contest, 2016 Oberon Prize for Poetry, and 2014 Maryland Writers’ Association Poetry Prize.
His first full-length poetry collection Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House Press) was published in 2018 and his chapbook States (Third Ear Books) was published in 1999.
He has collaborated with visual artists in Baltimore and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and with Dutch composer Brechtje Vandijk (a.k.a. Bec Plexus) for a lyrical adaptation of one of his poems for an original musical piece.
He has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Anam Cara Writers’ Retreat in Ireland.
A former public high school English teacher, he has taught poetry and creative writing workshops at the secondary and undergraduate levels, to adults in the greater Baltimore community, and online.
Jennifer Keith plays bass for the rock band Batworth Stone. Her poems have appeared in Sewanee Theological Review, The Nebraska Review, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Unsplendid, Best American Poetry 2015, JMWW, and elsewhere. Keith received the 2014 John Elsberg poetry prize, and was a finalist in the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Her 2022 chapbook, Truant Season, is available on Apathy Press. Keith’s first full-length book of poems, Terminarch, was chosen by David Yezzi for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award and is due to publish in 2024. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. His second book of poems, The Opposite of Cruelty, is forthcoming from Blair Publishing in Spring 2025. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.
Edgar Gabriel Silex is the author of Acts of Love (Curbstone Books, 2004) and Through All the Displacements (Curbstone Books, 1995). He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Maryland State Arts Council. He lives in Maryland.
