HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the March edition of the Wilde Reading Series, with Ashley Elizabeth and Sue Ellen Thompson, hosted by Jared Smith. Please join us at independent bookstore Queen Takes Book on Tuesday, March 11th 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 Ashley and Sue!

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

Ashley: The person that shows up the most is my grandmother. I draw a lot from the ancestors and sometimes it feels as though she’s not actually gone. It does hurt when I wake up from a work, but feels good while I am in it. Others that show up quite frequently include my partner, my parents, and my sister.

Sue: My mother—although my father shows up almost as often.

Where is your favorite place to write?

Ashley: I am not a writer that needs to be in a specific environment to write. I can write whenever, wherever as long as the ideas are coming. The most common place for me to write or at least start a draft is in my car in my voices notes app or regular notes if I’m at a stoplight, but it always gets transferred to paper for initial edits.

Sue: At home in Oxford, MD, in my studio over the garage.

Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?

Ashley: Not at all. I wait for ideas to come to me, and once they do, I must get to it in that moment instead of trying to reach an idea of comfortability. By then, the idea usually is long gone!

Sue: I like to get physical exercise first, so I always go to the gym before sitting down to write.

Who always gets a first read?

Ashley: This depends on the piece and when I write it. Normally, my sister, Mel Sherrer, gets a first look since I take a lot of her workshops and it’s only fair to share what I got from the workshop. Sometimes, my partner gets a first read if I drop everything to write some.

Sue: No one aside from myself.

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

Ashley: There are several. Whenever I am grieving, I return to The Cruel Country by Judith Ortiz Cofer. House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros usually brightens my day as well. Such a colorful text. With my students, I return to our curricular texts quite often. They each bring something different and I get something different from them each time I return. Before I do re-reads I do try to read something different in between re-reads. You know, for balance.

Sue: Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems.

What is the most memorable reading you have attended?

Ashley: As an audience member, Nikki Giovanni‘s reading will always stay with me. Out of the several readings I’ve been to, I think I took the most notes during that reading.

As a reader, I’ve been fortunate enough to take part in several events. It’s hard to pick which was most memorable, but probably my second reading with Garden Party Collective as it was to highlight my chapbook about teaching, red line. The parents of one of my students that died suddenly were there, and it was the first time I felt physically unable to continue to read but also felt like I had the most impact with.

Sue: Philip Levine‘s 2011 reading at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, right after he’d been appointed U.S. Poet Laureate.

• Ashley Elizabeth (she/her) is a Baltimore-based poet and winner of the 2024 Garden Party Collective Chapbook Contest. She is a Pushcart-nominated writer and educator whose work has appeared in SWIMM, Voicemail Poems, Rigorous, and Sage Cigarettes, among others. She is the author of four chapbooks, including red line and CHARM(ed). Her debut full-length collection, A Family Thing, is out now from ELJ Editions.

You can find Ashley on Instagram and Twitter as @ae_thepoet, or @aetheblkpoet on Bluesky, or on her personal website, aetheblkpoet.com.

• Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of six books of poetry— most recently Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems. Before moving to the Eastern Shore in 2006, she taught at Middlebury College, Binghamton University, Wesleyan University, and Central Connecticut State University. A resident of Oxford for the past 18 years, she has been mentoring adult poets and teaching workshops at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda. In 2010, the Maryland Library Association awarded her its prestigious Maryland Author Award.

Sue’s home online is sueellenthompson.com, and she can be reached on Facebook as Sue Ellen Thompson, Poet.