Constellation for Kids presents:

The Writers Guild at Bloomington presents

Last Sunday Poetry & Open Mic

featuring Zach Hannah and Su Flatt

THURSDAY, JUL 10 @ 6pm EST

featuring poets Jennifer Moore and Justin Hamm
with music by Matt Lundquist

OPEN MIC to follow
BEER & WINE available for purchase

Sponsored in part by the Bloomington Arts Commission and the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association

Originally from the flatlands of central Illinois, JUSTIN HAMM now lives near Twain territory in Missouri. He is the author of four books of poetry, Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007-2021, The Inheritance, American Ephemeral, and Lessons in Ruin, and a book of photographs entitled Midwestern. He is also the creator of Poet Baseball Cards and the founding editor of the museum of americana. Justin was chosen as a 2022 Woody Guthrie Poet, a 2020 Missouri Arts Council Featured Artist, a finalist for the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2014 Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. In 2022 he delivered a performance entitled “The American Midwest: A Story in Poems” at TEDx Oshkosh. Justin currently works as an elementary librarian in the small town of Mexico, Missouri, where he lives with his wife, Mel, and their two daughters.

JENNIFER MOORE is the author of Easy Does It (The University of Akron Press, 2021), The Veronica Maneuver (The University of Akron Press, 2015), and Smaller Ghosts (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Ploughshares, Interim, DIAGRAM, The Cincinnati Review, and other venues, and criticism and reviews have appeared in Jacket2, Rhetoric Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies with the Jentel Arts Foundation, Artsmith, the Leña Artist Research and Residency Centre, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Ora Lerman Charitable Trust. A native of the Seattle area, she holds a B.A. in English from Mercyhurst University, an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A professor of creative writing and Director of the Honors Program at Ohio Northern University, she lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.

MATT LUNDQUIST gathers inspiration for songs from the Lost Roads, Deep Woods, and Front Porches of Southern Indiana. In 2022 he won the John Hartford Memorial Festival Songwriting Contest for his tune “Hartford’s Bend.” He can play slide guitar like a spring creek sings. He can calm the spirits with his pedal steel style. Traveled to many funky little towns and far away forests with a Big Gibson Jumbo and another new song. In Bloomington, Indiana, you’ll find him stompin’ with cosmic folk rockers Otto & the Moaners, singin’ Garcia/Hunter tunes with Dead Country, or pickin’ in your friends backyard.

Constellation Stage and Screen presents:

The Writers Guild at Bloomington presents Last Sunday Poetry & Open Mic

featuring J.I.B and Nikki Blankenship Flaugher of Portsmouth, OH

J.I.B. is a prose poet and essayist from Southern Ohio. His work has been published in journals, magazines, and various Midwest presses. You can follow his work, travels, and performances on Instagram @j.i.b.trash.poet or on Facebook @ J Ian Bush.

Nikki Blankenship Flaugher bio forthcoming.

Aminatta Forna

Award-winning author of several novels and the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion

Aminatta Forna is an award winning writer. Through fiction and non-fiction she has examined the effects of war and trauma. Formerly a journalist for BBC TV, her first book, The Devil that Danced on the Water, was an investigation into the murder of her father, a political activist and Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience, in Sierra Leone in the 1970’s. There followed three novels, including the multi award winning and bestselling The Memory of Love. A firm believer in the resilience of the human spirit, Aminatta’s last novel is titled, Happiness.

Born in Scotland to a Scottish mother and West African father, Aminatta’s childhood was spent moving between worlds and even included spells in Iran and Thailand.  She first came to the United States as a Harkness Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. Aminatta is widely traveled and her boundary-crossing life provides the context for her understanding of history, culture and politics. Her adventures are the subject of her most recent book, an essay collection, The Window Seat. 

The recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, Aminatta has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize and been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature (widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel).

Aminatta has written and presented television documentaries including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013). She is a frequent contributor to BBC radio arts and current affairs programs.

Her essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books and Vogue.