Open Mouth Reading Series will host a public poetry reading at 7 p.m. Sunday, June 2, at the Mt. Sequoyah Conference Center as the capstone to the annual Open Mouth Poetry Retreat. The reading will feature award-winning poets and retreat faculty Franny Choi and Nate Marshall, with opening readings by retreat participants. This event is free and open to the public.

Franny Choi is a queer Korean-American poet and playwright. A member of the Dark Noise Collective, Choi is currently a Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan and a Citywide Poets Site Leader at the Detroit School of Arts. A Kundiman Fellow and graduate of the VONA Workshop, in 2016 she founded the Brew & Forge Book Fair, a fundraising project that brings together poetry readers and writers to build capacity in social justice community organizations.

She is the author of two poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing 2014), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press 2017). She has received awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Helen Zell Writers Program, as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review and New England Review, and her work has been featured by the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, PBS NewsHour and Angry Asian Man.

Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He is an experienced and versatile educator, working with youth and adults in both academic and community settings. The co-writer of Chicago Public School's first literary arts curriculum, he develops lesson plans using creative writing to help participants discuss social justice, mental health, community development and other topics pertinent to social science. He is currently the Assistant Director of Wabash College's Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies where he also serves as a visiting assistant professor of English and Black Studies.

Marshall is the author of Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's award for Poetry Book of the Year, The Great Lakes College Association's New Writer Award, and is an editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books 2015). Marshall co-wrote No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks with Eve Ewing, produced by Manual Cinema and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation. His last rap album, Grown, came out in 2015 with his group Daily Lyrical Product.

The annual Open Mouth Retreat features generative workshops and seeks to build community around poetry in an environment that fosters writing. Poets, established or emerging, will participate in conferences with retreat faculty and devote time to the honing and development of their projects. Applications for the 2020 Retreat will open November 15, 2019. For more information on the retreat and other programming, visit www.openmouthreadings.com.

This year's Open Mouth Retreat is supported in part by The Arkansas International and the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing and Translation.

About the Open Mouth Reading Series:
The Open Mouth Reading Series is a community-based poetry series located in Fayetteville, Arkansas, founded by poets M. D. Myers and Molly Bess Rector in October of 2015. A federal 501(c)(3) non-profit, Open Mouth works to enrich the Northwest Arkansas community through close contact with poetry and with poets from the larger literary world. Open Mouth hosts readings, workshops, a summer poetry retreat and an annual fall poetry festival. For more information about Open Mouth or to donate, visit www.openmouthreadings.com and sign up for the Open Mouth newsletter.