Sunday November 9, 2025 at 4pm, The HOT L Poets Series continues at Bird in Hand Cafe & Bookstore (Baltimore) with poets Rick Hilles & Samyak Shertok! The reading includes an open mic so bring a poem (1 poem, 3 min. or less). Now in our 7th year, the reading series is sponsored by Smartish Pace and Baltimore Poets Theatre. Hosts: Clare Banks, David Yezzi, Stephen Reichert, and Dan Todd.
Rick Hilles, a recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, a Fulbright, and a Whiting Writers Award, is the author of several poetry collections, most recently My Roberto Clemente (C&R Press). His poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, Michigan Quarterly Review, Narrative, Poetry, Salmagundi, Smartish Pace, and Southern Review, among many other places. He teaches in the MFA Program at Vanderbilt University.
Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University. For more, please visit samyakshertok.com.
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