Kramers Poetry Reading: Spring Edition
TUESDAY, MAY 23RD, 7:00PM
Spring is well underway, and before we slip into a summer heat coma, let’s celebrate these few weeks of beautiful weather with poetry! Kramers Spring Poetry Reading, part of our seasonal poetry reading series, will feature three local writers: Sunu P. Chandy, Taylor Johnson, and Cindy Savett. Each will read for about 15 minutes from their own books.
The reading also features a short spring-themed writing contest, the winner of which earns a $20 gift card to Kramers. Come join us and toast to books, birds, and the breeze!
Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney. Sunu’s collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was selected for the 2021 Terry J. Cox Prize, and published by Regal House in March 2023. Her work can also be found in Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Sunu also serves as the legal director for the National Women’s Law Center and serves on the board of the Transgender Law Center.
Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He is the Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland.
Cindy Savett is the author of two full length collections, Child in the Road and The Breath, as well as the chapbooks, Rachel: In the Temporary Mist of Prayer, The Story of My Eyes, Battle for the Metal Kiss, and Overtures of Survival. Her work is included in the anthology, Challenges For The Delusional. Her poems have centered around varied aspects of grief following the sudden death of her daughter. Currently she is exploring the relationship of the “I” with the “Other”. More can be found at cindysavett.com.