About this Event
A celebration of Ben Gucciardi's new poetry collection, Arguments, with readings from Edgar Kunz and Samuel Cheney!
The poems in Arguments take their launch point from a quote from Yeats: “We make out of our quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
These poems confront the contradictions that shape contemporary life: how to make a self, a family and an ethical life within exploitative systems that demand complicity.
We'll hear Ben Gucciardi read from these poems, and as Baltimore-based peots Edgar Kunz and Samuel Cheney read their poems in support, we think there'll be some interesting conversations between their pieces. Join us to hear for yourself!
Order ARGUMENTS here!
Order FIXER here!
Originally from San Francisco, California, Ben Gucciardi is the author of Arguments (Persea Books, 2026), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021), selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, and named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021), winner of the 2020 Quarterly West Chapbook contest, and I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020). In addition to writing, Ben founded Soccer Without Borders, a non-profit organization serving immigrant youth with headquarters in Baltimore.
Edgar Kunz is the author of two books: Fixer (Ecco, 2023), a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and Tap Out (Ecco, 2019). He is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. He has also received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Vanderbilt University, where he earned his MFA, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Oxford American, Yale Review, and American Poetry Review. He splits his time between Baltimore and Richmond, where he teaches in the English Department and MFA program at VCU.
Samuel Cheney is from Centerville, Utah. His poems have been published widely in magazines like Copper Nickel, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Narrative, Plume, and Salmagundi—new work is coming soon in The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and was chosen by Richard Siken as Finalist for the C.D. Wright Prize for Poetry. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Tickner Fellowship, and scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the State of Utah. He has taught at Johns Hopkins and Stevenson University, worked at the Criterion Collection and Gasser Grunert gallery, and run writing workshops for teens in the Los Angeles Unified School District and at 826LA. He lives in Baltimore, where he works for the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and is an Assistant Editor of Smartish Pace.
His debut manuscript, BELIEVERS, was a Finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series, and is seeking publication.
Event venue & nearby stays
Bird in Hand Coffee & Books, 11 East 33rd Street, Baltimore, United States
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