HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the January edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with David Drager and Sally Rosen Kindred, hosted by Jared Smith. Please join us at independent bookstore Queen Takes Book on Tuesday, January 14th at 7 p.m., at 6955 Oakland Mills Rd, Suite E, Columbia MD, 21045. Please spread the word— bring your friends, family and students! Light refreshments will be served and books by the readers available for sale.

An open mic follows the featured authors and we encourage you to participate. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time, about two poems. Sign up when you arrive, or in advance via this online form.

Below, get to know David and Sally!

Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?

Sally: My mother. She was a poet, and I think my earliest poems were attempts at conversations with her. I’m still writing some poems to her ghost.

Where is your favorite place to write?

David: Any place I can be alone, and when no one notices that I am missing.

Sally: My desk at home, upstairs where I can see the tops of the trees, or the couch downstairs where a dear dog and cat keep me company.

Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?

David: No.

Sally: Most days I walk in the woods first, and I always make a cup of tea.

Who always gets a first read?

David: The audience at an open mic.

Sally: I’m so lucky to have three dear friends—two I’ve known since middle school, once since my early twenties—who are longtime, thoughtful first readers. And of course my spouse.

What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?

David: The Stranger by Albert Camus.

Sally: A book of contemporary poems I return to often—and have read more than twice just recently—is Jessica Cuello’s Liar. It does striking work with language, syntax, repetition, and the child’s idiosyncratic perspective on her world.

What is the most memorable reading you have attended?

David: Patricia Smith at the Pratt Library when Blood Dazzler was recently released.

Sally: I was fortunate enough to hear Lucille Clifton read twice—once at College Park in the early 90s, and again in 2007 in Columbia. Like her poems, she was fierce, witty, celestial—a singular presence and voice.

• David Drager is “an oral poet…a denizen of poetry world divers…a wolf in beloved’s clothes…a moment’s hesitation before storm…a wanderer between silence and of sky…a word racing, gracing noting, mess of grammar lack.”

He has been known to log into Facebook once or twice a year.

• Sally Rosen Kindred‘s third book is Where the Wolf (2021), winner of the Diode Book Prize and the Julie Suk Award. She is also the author of No Eden and Book of Asters, and three chapbooks. She’s received two poetry awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Image Journal, Shenandoah, and New Ohio Review. She teaches online for The Poetry Barn.

Sally’s homepage is sallyrosenkindred.com, and she can be reached online via Facebook @sallyrosenkindred and Bluesky @sallypoet.bsky.social.