LMNL Sunday with Rodney Jones, Rodger Kamenetz, & Justin Hamm

Come through for your monthly LMNL dose of that good stuff (you know, Lit stuff and Community) at The Domino on Sunday, November 17. This month we’re welcoming Rodney Jones, Rodger Kamenetz, and Justin Hamm to the stage to share their poetry.

When Transparent Gestures won the National Book Circle Award for Poetry in 1990, Thomas Disch introduced Rodney Jones as “a brand new world-class poet. That same year another reviewer wrote, “Reading a Rodney Jones poem is like having a cold beer with the smartest redneck in the world.” Since then, he’s tried to hold to those standards.

Rodger Kamenetz is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Yonder (LavenderInk), Dream Logic (PURH) and The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022 (Ben Yehuda Press). He’s Professor Emeritus at LSU, where he founded the MFA in Creative Writing, and lives in New Orleans. www.kamenetz.com

Originally from the flatlands of central Illinois, Justin Hamm now lives near Twain territory in Missouri. He is the author of four books of poetry, Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007-2021, The Inheritance, American Ephemeral, and Lessons in Ruin, and a book of photographs entitled Midwestern. He is also the creator of Poet Baseball Cards and the founding editor of the museum of americana.

Justin has been chosen as a 2022 Woody Guthrie Poet, a 2020 Missouri Arts Council Featured Artist, a finalist for the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2014 Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. In 2022 he delivered a performance entitled “The American Midwest: a Story in Poems” at TEDx Oshkosh. The recording can be viewed on YouTube. In 2019, Justin’s poem “Goodbye, Sancho Panza” was studied by approximately 50,000 students worldwide as a part of the World Scholar’s Cup curriculum.

Justin’s poems, stories, photographs, collages, and reviews have appeared in River Styx, Nimrod International Journal, The Midwest Quarterly, Sugar House Review, Verse Daily, Southern Indiana Review, New Poetry from the Midwest, and many other publications. Additionally, his award-winning photographs have featured in numerous solo gallery shows. His poetry/photography hybrid exhibition “Midwestern” traveled the Midwest region from 2018-2020.