Two professors featured at Wednesday Night Poetry
On their Love & Animals National Book Tour, award-winning poets and former Arkansas professors Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs will be the double feature for Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee+Tea, 110 Central Ave.
The regular open mic session for all poets will begin at 6:30 p.m. today. Brown and Jacobs will begin their feature set at 7:15 p.m., followed by another round of open mic. Admission is free and open to all ages.
Brown and Jacobs celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary on Oct. 21 “of a love story and marriage that began when they both worked in the Little Rock area as professors, at UALR and Hendrix College respectively,” a news release said.
“My wife Nickole and I left full-time teaching to ‘write full time.’ What this looks like in practice is us on the road giving readings and teaching workshops, doing a number of freelance editorial gigs, and trying, around all of that, to find the time to write. As we like to say, we’re poetry guns for hire,” Jacobs said in the release. This week, “fitting that they are back where their love began in Arkansas,” they are also leading creative writing workshops and have a public reading at Hendrix College before events in Sumter, S.C. and back in Asheville, N.C., where they live.
A Kentucky native who once shared a stage at NYU with Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, and worked as the editorial assistant to the “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” author Hunter S. Thompson, Brown had a history in arts and letters. She began writing at 15 after attending the Governor’s School for the Arts, a free program for specially chosen students in the Louisville area, and soon after won a Scholastic Writing award. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Louisville and studied Romantic Poetry at Oxford University as an English
Speaking Union Scholar. In 2003, she received her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College. After a decade in publishing and marketing with Sarabande Books, she began her work as a professor in 2008, lending her knowledge and mentorship to students at UALR. In 2015, she left her tenure-track position to write full time.
“For the past three years, I’ve been at work on a bestiary of sorts, investigating the complex, interdependent, and often fraught relationship between human and nonhuman animals … they speak in a queer, Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving,” she said. Brown has two collections and two chapbooks, and continues to teach through MFA programs, universities, conferences, and festivals with her wife.
Jacobs, a central Florida native and living from California to New York since, was a professor at Hendrix College when she met Brown. She has her Bachelor of Arts degree from Smith College and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Purdue University. “I’ve been writing for about as long as I remember as books were what saved me as a kid, letting me know that there was a larger world than the one I was living in, which would accept me in my entirety: queer kid, nerdy athlete, pun-loving dork (and all of these qualities still hold true!),” she said. Jacobs has written two collections of lyric narrative poetry and a chapbook. “As for poets I admire, I’m particularly enamored of two Arkansas natives, Seth Pennington and Bryan Borland, the wonder men behind Sibling Rivalry Press,” she said.
“We are incredibly honored to feature this talented and riveting pair of poets at WNP, and to bring their voices to the people of Hot Springs,” said WNP host Kai Coggin. This week marks 1,604 consecutive Wednesdays of open mic poetry in downtown Hot Springs since Feb. 1, 1989. Email wednesdaynightpoetry@gmail.com for more information.