COUPLET is a quarterly reading series, produced, curated and hosted by poet Leah Umansky since 2011. It features both emerging and established poets. COUPLET is co-hosted by Books are Magic in Brooklyn, NY and sponsored by Poets and Writers.
This event will Livestream at the Books are Magic YouTube channel at 7pm SHARP!
Our six readers are:
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and others. Her debut poetry collection titled Someone Else's Hunger was published by Four Way Books on September 15, 2025 and received the gold medal from the 2025 North American Book Awards. Her chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship and was published in 2020. Recently, she has been named a 2025 New Jersey Poetry Fellow, a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop, the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Jen DeGregorio is the author of the poetry collection What to Wear Out. Her writing has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The American Poetry Review, Literary Hub, Paterson Literary Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, and many other publications. She works as the associate director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University.
Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published ten books of poems, including "Gabriel: A Poem" and "Stranger By Night," and eight books of prose among them "How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry" and his new memoir, "My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy." He lives in Brooklyn.
Garrett Hongo was born in Hawaiʻi and grew up in Los Angeles. His new book is Ocean of Clouds: Poems. Other collections are Yellow Light, The River of Heaven (a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), and Coral Road. In non-fiction is The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo. Also published are The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi. Honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright Program, and the NEA, he was the 2022 winner of the Aiken Taylor Award. He lives in Eugene where he is Distinguished Professor at the University of Oregon.
Daniel Lawless’s latest book is I Tell You This Now. Recent/forthcoming poems in FIELD, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Los Angeles Review, upstreet, SALT, The Louisville Review, Massachusetts Review, Solstice, JAMA, and Dreaming Awake: New Prose Poetry from the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. . A recipient of a continuing Shifting Foundation grant, he is the founder and editor of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, and the annual Plume Poetry anthologies.
Barbara Ungar is the author of six books, most recently After Naming the Animals. Honors include the Snyder Prize, Gival Poetry Prize, and being named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Books of 2015 and 2019. She has published poems in Scientific American, Rattle, Southern Indiana Review, and many other journals. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Bulgarian. Professor emerita from the College of Saint Rose, she lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.