Poetry @ The Public: Sandy Longhorn & Kai Coggin

Join us for our final 2024 Poetry @ The Public! P@P is made possible by a partnership with The Slant and UCA.

Cozy up with us for our final Poetry @ The Public for the season. Doors will open at 2:00 pm for a meet-and-greet with the authors and coffee, hot chocolate, and cookies. At 2:30 we'll hear selected works from our local poets, Sandy and Kai. For more information about the authors, see below.

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About the featured poets:

Kai Coggin is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and a recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her project Sharing Tree Space. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Kai is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, an Interchange Grant Fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. 

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Sandy Longhorn is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UCA, Associate Chair of the Department of Film Theatre, & Creative Writing, and Coordinator of the  Creative Writing Program. After earning an MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas, Sandy worked briefly as a composition instructor at the University of Arkansas-Monticello before spending ten years teaching composition at Pulaski Technical College in North Little Rock, Arkansas. During her time at PTC, she published her first three books. Blood Almanac, a collection of poems based on Longhorn’s MFA thesis, won the 2005 Anhinga Prize for Poetry (Anhinga Press 2006). Longhorn’s second collection, The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, won the 2013 Jacar Press Full Length Book contest (Jacar 2013). The Alchemy of My Mortal Form won the 2014 Louise Bogan Award (Trio House Press 2015). In the fall of 2016, Sandy received the Porter Fund Literary Prize.

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