Name: Word of Mouth Feature-Open Reading
Start: 2026-01-25T18:00:00-05:00
Location: MOTR

Word of Mouth launches its 12th year with two poets, one former Cincinnati local now residing down south, in Florida, and one from our own galaxy of the tri-state:
KATE POLAK is an artist, writer, and teacher. Her work has recently appeared in DIAGRAM, Miracle Monocle, McSweeney’s, and Inverted Syntax, who nominated her for “Best of the Net.” Her previous books, “Ethics in the Gutter and Science Fiction and the Historical Novel”, are scholarship dealing with the intersections between atrocity, visual culture, and historical fiction. She has three collections of poetry she is shopping around with potential publishers. She lives in south Florida with her familiars and aspires to a swamp hermitage.
PHOEBE REEVES earned her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and now is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She has three chapbooks of poetry, most recently “The Flame of Her Will” (Milk & Cake), and her first full length collection, “Helen of Bikini” (Lily Poetry Review) was published in March, 2023. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Best New Poets, Grist, Forklift OH, and The Chattahoochee Review, and she has been awarded fellowships by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Cincinnati, OH with her husband Don Peteroy, amidst her unruly urban garden.