THR in the DMV: The Hopkins Review at Home
10:00 am – 11:00 am
31st Street & Barclay Street
Waverly Neighborhood
While The Hopkins Review publishes voices from across the globe, it also celebrates local talent in Baltimore and the DMV. Their community of writers includes both journal contributors and journal editors, including students, faculty, and graduates of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Join the journal for a reading by some of the area’s most exciting literary talents, including both debut and established poets and fiction writers. Shane McCrae, Megan Howell, Lindsay Bernal, Elise Levine, Lauren Russell, and Alejandro Lucero.
SHANE McCRAE’s most recent book of poetry is New and Collected Hell. He has edited a volume of John Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs, which will be published in December. McCrae’s awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Award. MEGAN HOWELL is a native Washingtonian, a writer, and a 2025 National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree. Her debut book is called Softie: Stories, which Deesha Philyaw says Howell has “created a new lane in which ferocity and tenderness co-exist in smart, seamlessly crafted narratives … an inspiration for every writer who has been misled to believe their work has to fit in certain conventional boxes to be excellent.” LINDSAY BERNAL is the author of What It Doesn’t Have To Do With, winner of the National Poetry Series. ELISE LEVINE is the author of the story collection Big of You, as well as five other books of fiction, and publications in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, and five times in Best Canadian Stories, among others. She teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins. LAUREN RUSSELL is the author of three books, including A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close and Descent, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award. An NEA and Cave Canem fellow, she teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. ALEJANDRO LUCERO is the author of Sapello Son, “a beautiful and quietly ingenious portrait of life–often family life–in Sapello, New Mexico, a town of just over a thousand, which lies 135 miles northeast of Albuquerque. Each poem feels essential and ingrained with truth,” says Jonathan Blum, The Usual Uncertainties. Lucero is a senior editor for The Hopkins Review.
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Shane McCrae’s most recent books of poetry are New and Collected Hell and The Many Hundreds of the Scent.”McCrae approaches Dante’s allegorical vision with an urgency derived from a struggle that collapses the personal and the social, until the metaphysical realm seems the only possible stage. . . . [He] exploits, in a way that few other modern poets have been able to, the power of allegory.” writes Elisa Gonzalez, The New Yorker. In 2024, his memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, was published by Scribner. He has edited a volume of John Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs, titled Only Sing, which will be published in December. McCrae’s awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer’s Award, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
Instagram: @akasomeguy
Megan Howell is a native Washingtonian, a writer, and a 2025 National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment, among other publications. Her debut short story collection, Softie: Stories, declared “a beautiful and striking collection about friendship, secrets, and unspeakable desires,” in a starred review by Publishers Weekly, and was recently short-listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.
www.meganhowell.org
Instagram: @meganhhowell
Lindsay Bernal is the author of What It Doesn’t Have to Do With, winner of the National Poetry Series. Jericho Brown writes, “The humor of Lindsay Bernal is rife with allusion to the history of American poetic tradition and cut with merciless self-reflection . . . or as Bernal herself says, ‘Something there is that doesn’t love melodrama.’ … These poems question what we take for granted about language and the ways our own words can bind us: ‘Darkness doesn’t descend suddenly at all.’” Poems from her second manuscript appear or are forthcoming in Chicago Review, the Georgia Review, the Hopkins Review, New England Review, Oversound, and other journals. She coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, where she also co-directs the Writers Here & Now reading series and teaches undergraduate poetry workshops and courses on poetics.
www.lindsaybernal.com
Instagram: @not_a_caryatid
Elise Levine’s new story collection Big of You debuts this fall. “Levine is an expert at conveying confusion and dislocation in a magic shorthand that is all hers. Each ingenious sentence blends beauty and sorrow in an intimate voice close to your ear. The writing is whip-smart with heart, it’s nutritious, it’s everything you need,” writes Mark Anthony Jarman, Burn Man. She is also the author of Say This: Two Novellas, the novels Blue Field and Requests and Dedications, and the story collections This Wicked Tongue and Driving Men Mad. Her work has also appeared in publications including Ploughshares and Copper Nickel and has been included five times in Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches in the MA in writing program at Johns Hopkins University.
Lauren Russell is a poet and writer in hybrid forms. She is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance; Descent, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush. In Window, “Russell’s hybrid collection is powerhouse poetry, a lighthouse calling us out of the personal and systemic haze that surrounds a life with disabilities, without denying the resilience required every moment just to paddle back to shore. Window is lonely, wise, and a necessary read. We needed this collection decades ago, not only as a clear lens into neurodivergence, but as a study in human empathy for others and ourselves,” writes Erin Vachon, The Rumpus. Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Brooklyn Rail, the anthology Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her cats, Cat Jeoffry and Lady Day.
laurenrussellpoet.com
Instagram: @laureninred
Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son, was named the Editors’ Selection for the Frost Place Competition. “Formally dynamic and audacious, the poems in Alejandro Lucero’s Sapello Son sprawl like the New Mexico landscape they inhabit— across memory, family, and the complexities of the body … Here we have a poet of remarkable perception: his words unreel difficult notions of grief, masculinity, and addiction with reverence and risk,” says Aldo Amparán, Brother Sleep. His latest work appears in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, Passages North, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. He lives in Baltimore, where he is a Salter Lecturer in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and a senior editor for The Hopkins Review.
alejandrolucero.com
Instagram: @alejandrolucero505
The Hopkins Review publishes today’s vital voices and visions in literature, culture, criticism, public-facing scholarship, and the arts. We strive to bring the international, national, and local together under one cover, contributing to Johns Hopkins University’s broader mission of “knowledge for the world” by engaging international voices and conversations alongside our nation’s most exciting established and emerging writers and platforming the rich artistic and literary community of our home city of Baltimore on that same global stage.
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