Join us to celebrate 14 years of Leah Umansky’s reading series, COUPLET!

About the Poets:

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, as well as Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz, and co-translated, with Yuki Tanaka, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a Poetry Editor-at-Large for Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face, was a September pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of several books, including MEMORY and Mother.

January Gill O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012 to 2018, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Sierra, and more. A recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She lives in Beverly, Massachusetts, and chairs the AWP Board of Directors (2022–2025).

Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024), as well as a book of essays Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (University of Michigan Poets on Poetry, 2025), and the craft book Teaching Writing Through Poetry: An Introduction to Poetic Form (Bloomsbury, 2025). He is Professor of English at CUNY’s BMCC and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Leah Umansky is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, OF TYRANT (Word Works Books 2024.) She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. She is the creator of the STAY BRAVE Substack which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her creative work has been featured on PBS and The Slowdown Podcast, and in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, Bennington Review, and American Poetry Review. She is an educator and writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as Poetry School London, Poets House, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering and elsewhere. She is working on a fourth collection of poems ORDINARY SPLENDOR, on wonder, joy and love. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com