I was thrilled and honored to give a poetry reading at Belmont University in Nashville on April 21, 2026. I’m grateful to Cara Dees for inviting me and introducing me so generously. I’ve never enjoyed a reading nearly as much as this one, and I deeply appreciated the standing ovation, my first ever. A number of the poems I read include snatches of lyrics, all of which I sang (a practice I’ve always recommended to students). In “Crossing the Lagoon,” a love poem to LaWanda from Venice while I was leading a study tour, I sang the whole first verse of “The Water Is Wide” (broken up into phrases interspersed with talk), and I think I stayed on key.

Here’s the setlist for my reading:

1. Gossip
2. The Poet as a Seven-Year-Old Baseball Fan
3. New Song of the South
4. Social Networking
5. Daughter of a Preacher Man
6. Listening to A Love Supreme
7. Embarking
8. Ghazal of the Lagoon
9. Motor Lodge (first sonnet in “Summer Jobs”)
10. Pursuing the Delta Blues
11. Stadium
12. Li Bai in Chinatown
13. Crossing the Lagoon
14. Circle Line
15. Retreat
16. Song with a Bridge
17. Abecedarian Ode
18. The Weightlessness of Numbers
19. Accelerating

1-7 from The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024)
8-9 from The Disappearing Town (Miami University Press, 2000)
10-12 from Burning the Aspern Papers (Miami University Press, 2003)
13-16 from Sea Level Rising (Able Muse Press, 2015)
17 published in Passager (Issue 77, 2024)
18 published in Birmingham Poetry Review (Spring 2026)
19 not yet published; under submission