Join us for an evening with poets Brad Richard, W. Joe Hoppe, and Abe Louise Young (left to right, below).

Brad Richard chairs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans. 2015 Louisiana Artist of the Year, and poetry winner in the 2002 Poets & Writers Writers Exchange competition, Brad is the author of three collections of poems, Habitations, Motion Studies (winner of the 2010 Washington Prize) and Butcher’s Sugar, and two chapbooks, The Men in the Dark and Curtain Optional. His poems and reviews have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Okey-Panky, Unlikely Stories, Guernica, American Letters & Commentary, and other journals. Mr. Richard is co-director of the southeast Louisiana affiliate of the Scholastic Writing Awards and of The New Orleans New Writers Literary Festival. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Surdna Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

W. Joe Hoppe’s poems have appeared in Analecta, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, and The Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. His poems have been anthologized in Stand Up Poetry, How to be This Man, gumballpoetry.com, and Beatest State in the Union. Joe’s one-of-a-kind poetry video, “$5200 MSTA,” has been shown at the Dallas Video Festival, San Antonio Underground Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, and VideoEx in Zurich, Switzerland. His books include a collection of short stories, Harmon Place (1991) from Primal Press, a poetry collection, Galvanized (2007), from Dalton Publishing, and a second poetry collection, Diamond Plate (2012), from Obsolete Press. Hoppe is the Poet Lariat of Austin’s intellectual variety show The Dionysium. He has hosted numerous poetry events at Austin’s Malvern Books, including interviews of local poets, a reading and discussion of Emily Dickinson, a communal performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl celebrating its 60th anniversary, and an annual memorial reading for the late, great Austin poet Albert Huffstickler. He is currently finishing up a four-year effort to get a customized ’51 Plymouth Cranbrook roadworthy for a trip down Route 66 in the summer of 2017. Hoppe is an Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.

Abe Louise Young is an independent writer, educator and social justice activist. Her work has won a Grolier Poetry Prize, the Hawai’i Review’s Nell Altizer Award, a Narrative Magazine Story Prize, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing is forthcoming or has appeared in The Nation, WITNESS, New Letters, Feminist Wire and many other journals. She’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Heaven to Me (Headmistress Press) and Ammonite (Magnolia Press Collective). A lifelong social justice advocate, she’s also the author/editor of numerous guides, including Queer Youth Advice for Educators: How to Respect and Protect Your LGBTQ Students; Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays, and Vision from American Teenagers; and an archive of oral histories with Hurricane Katrina survivors, Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History Project. Young earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James Michener Fellow, and holds a BA from Smith College.