Come celebrate ’13’ years of COUPLET! COUPLET is a quarterly reading series, produced, curated and hosted by poet Leah Umansky since 2011. It features both emerging and established poets and is co-hosted by The Red Room. This will Livestream on the IG live at @couplet_series on IG.

Our readers for the ’13th Anniversary Event’ are:
1. Debora Kuan
2. Christian Teresi
3. Ruth Awad
4. Didi Jackson
5. Mark Doty
6. Marie Howe

About the Authors:

Debora Kuan is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Women on the Moon, Lunch Portraits, and XING. Her writing has appeared in Time magazine, Poetry, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and other publications.

Christian Teresi is a poet, essayist, and translator whose work has been published in many journals, including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Literary Hub, and Narrative. What Monsters You Make of Them is his first collection. His work has been supported by a fellowship from the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He holds degrees from Binghamton University and George Mason University. Born in Albany, New York, he currently lives in Washington, DC where he works on international education and public diplomacy initiatives.

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in Bomb, The New Yorker, and Oxford American among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and The Slow Down with Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and is a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches creative writing. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist.

Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane (April 2015), Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book Award, and My Alexandria, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize in the UK. He is also the author of four memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling What Is the Grass, Dog Years, Firebird, and Heaven’s Coast, as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word. Doty has received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize.

Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, New and Selected Poems; Magdalene: Poems; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.