Join All Ways Writing and Big Red Books for an evening of poetry featuring renowned poets Valzhyna Mort and Samyak Shertok joined by community readers Kelly Jo Lillian, Conrad Lochner, Marjorie Tesser, Tedo Wyman, and Laura Zaino.

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), named one of the best poetry book of 2020 by The New York Times and The NPR, and the winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. She teaches at Cornell 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 and longlisted for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Nepal, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University.