Season Highlights — July 2024 to June 2025

Celebrate has been the word for this past year.  At HoCoPoLitSo, we’ve been celebrating all year long, and we’ve gathered some photos to capture the high points of the year.

First, a picture of our founding members, taken a decade ago during HoCoPoLitSo’s last anniversary celebration.  Two of the founders have passed since then, but Jean Moon returned to active duty as Honorary Chair of 50th Anniversary Celebrations, with HoCoPoLitSo’s gratitude for her many contributions throughout the year.

HoCoPoLitSo launches each season with the Bauder Writer-in-Residence Program, this year featuring Tope Folarin, a shockingly poised and generous presence who met with high school and college students, and joined us at other events throughout the year.  His visits were again arranged by our High School Liaison, Judy Young.  Thank you, Judy!

The Howard County Poet Laureate Program was launched in late 2023 through a collaboration between HoCoPoLitSo, the Howard County Arts Council, and Howard County Government.  Truth Thomas, the inaugural laureate, was such a hit County Executive Calvin Ball moved forward with a companion Howard County Youth Poet Laureate Program, which welcomed its first appointee this past fall: Mai-Anh Nguyen, then a junior at Oakland Mills High School, pictured in the Lucille Clifton Room at Busboys and Poets.

Lucille, as many of you know, featured in the first-ever HoCoPoLitSo event, held November of 1974.  She eventually moved to Columbia and served as artistic advisor to HoCoPoLitSo for many years, as well as Maryland Poet Laureate from 1979–1985.  Since her passing, HoCoPoLitSo has hosted the Lucille Clifton Reading Series, which each year highlights a literary topic or cause we feel Lucille would have been proud to champion.  This year’s event, Writing the Land, partnered with the national project of the same name and with Howard County Conservancy, to host a reading of nature poems from Patti Ross, Naomi Ayala, and Hiram Larew held in the Conservancy’s garden amphitheater, to raise awareness for the importance of protecting our natural habitat.

The annual Bauder Lecture has become a beloved signature event, presented in partnership between HoCoPoLitSo and Howard Community College.  This year it featured the wildly popular and charismatic Elizabeth Acevedo, in conversation with celeste doaks.  We were all touched by Acevedo’s humor and humanity, and she also claimed the enthralled attention of the student audiences.

One of HoCoPoLitSo’s new efforts inspired by the 50th anniversary was an Endowment Campaign calling for contributions to HoCoPoLitSo’s endowed agency fund held at the Community Foundation of Howard County, to provide stable support for our next fifty years of community-focused literary programming.  Led by Anniversary Chair Jean Moon, the campaign doubled our Endowment with new contributions totaling more than $120,000.

Donors to the campaign and other supporters were invited to a Donor Appreciation Party in October 2024.  It was a thrilling event, with readings by three poets laureate: Mai-Anh Nguyen, Truth Thomas— and Lady Brion, in one of her first public performances as the newly-appointed Maryland Poet Laureate, more than living up to the legacy left by her predecessor, our dear friend Grace Cavalieri.

With us that evening was County Executive Calvin Ball, who was there to join us in celebration— and to present a formal proclamation dedicating the date as Howard County’s official HoCoPoLitSo Day, recognizing and awarding the 50th anniversary with a substantial one-time grant provided by Howard County Government to further enhance HoCoPoLitSo’s programming, upgrade equipment, and help to prepare us for another half-century of serving our community.

HoCoPoLitSo’s monthly Wilde Reading Series continued at a new location, the newly-opened independent bookstore in Columbia, Queen Takes Book.  More than 20 featured authors participated, and countless open mic performances from the series’ passionate audiences.  Laura Shovan, Ann Bracken, and Linda Joy Burke continued as the program coordinators, and welcomed to their crew Jared Smith, a prolific local poet and educator.

Another long-time partner, Little Patuxent Review, included Mickie Kennedy, the 2024 winner of HoCoPoLitSo’s Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, among other readers at the January launch event for their winter issue.  The reading was held at The Carriage House, a long ago-converted barn now home to the Kittamaqundi Community Church.  Many members of HoCoPoLitSo are also involved at LPR— Susan Thornton Hobby and Tim Singleton regularly interview writers and visual artists for the journal— and their publications sometimes might provide a sneak peek into participants at upcoming HoCoPoLitSo events.

The following month, we were back in Smith Theatre at the Horowitz Center for Visual & Performing Arts on the campus of Howard Community College for HoCoPoLitSo’s annual Irish Evening, this year titled The Language of Landscape: Seán Hewitt on Place, Identity, and Belonging.  This year it featured the many-faceted writer Seán Hewitt, who is a poet, novelist, and memoirist who also writes literary criticism.  Hewitt was featured in conversation with Georgetown University Professor Cóilín Parsons, reprising his role as moderator; the evening also featured music by Poor Man’s Gambit and Unranked, and an introduction from Chris Morash, the Irish Embassy’s Political and Diaspora Attaché.

The 17th annual Blackbird Poetry Festival was again held in partnership with Howard Community College.  The all-day event celebrating poetry across the college campus, titled “Poetry in Motion,” featured Denice Frohman, poet and performer from New York City.  HoCoPoLitSo’s writer-in-residence Tope Folarin contributed to the morning writing workshop, and both Folarin and Howard County Poet Laureate Truth Thomas joined Frohman for the evening Nightbird Reading.

That same month of April, we partnered with the Elkridge Furnace Inn to host an English Garden Literary Tea, where guests enjoyed a sumptuous full course of teas and snacks in the Inn’s covered garden while taking in poetry from HoCoPoLitSo board members.

Readers, literature lovers, and writers from around the globe can watch HoCoPoLitSo’s talk show, The Writing Life, on our YouTube channel to see more than two hundred warm conversations between famed writers, including fifteen of the nation’s poets laureate, as well as local writers and a global smorgasbord of novelists, poets, memoirists, and historians.  Three new editions were produced this year: poet and memoirist Seán Hewitt hosted by Cóilín Parsons in February 2025; Howard County’s inaugural poet laureate, Truth Thomas, hosted by Alan W. King in March 2025, and poet Denice Frohman hosted by Tope Folarin in April 2025.

In May, HoCoPoLitSo sponsored the Books in Bloom Festival hosted by the Downtown Columbia Partnership.  We helped produce Poetry+, a stunning session that included HoCoPoLitSo favorites Truth Thomas, Lady Brion and E. Ethelbert Miller— and added Kwame Alexander, editor of This is the Honey, a tremendous anthology of poets of color, dozens of whom have appeared at HoCoPoLitSo events.  Howard County Youth Poet Laureate Mai-Anh Nguyen closed out her one-year term at a reading and jam-packed open mic session for local student authors.  Board members Susan Thornton Hobby and Faye McCray were organizers of Spilled Milk: A Storytelling Event About Motherhood that included nine speakers and attracted an appreciative crowd.

It was on that high note that we ended our programming year— and look forward to what is ahead.  Details of past and upcoming events can always be found here, at hocopolitso.org; and we encourage you to subscribe to our new quarterly newsletter, HoCoPoLitSo’s Rhyme & Reason, distributed through Substack.