Join us for a poetry read from a few very talented poets.

Known for his Billy Collins-esque wit and his On This Day in History poems, Ramon Presson has been engaged in poem making since the 3rd grade, receiving a 1st Place Award from the Academy of American Poets  for his collegiate collection of original poetry.  Ramon credits finding his poetic voice again after decades of silence and prose to Stellasue Lee, a poet twice-nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, who moved in 2007 from California to a mere three blocks away in their shared Thompson Station subdivision. Stellasue has been Ramon's personal mentor and greatest cheerleader since then. With poems published in several magazines and literary journals, Presson received the Janice Keck Literary Award in 2018 for his collection of poetry, Voice Lessons.  A licensed marriage & family therapist in Franklin, Presson has been a featured humor columnist in local newspapers for two decades, now a regular in the Williamson Herald. Ramon Presson's philosophy of life and poetry is summed up in this quote by G.K Chesterton: “I do not deny that the world needs priests to remind us that we shall all one day die; but I insist that the world also needs another type of priest--the poet--to remind us that we are not dead yet.”

Jeff Hardin is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Coming into an Inheritance, Watermark, and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being. His work has received the Nicholas Roerich Prize, The Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Image, Swing, Bennington Review, The Laurel Review, and Southern Poetry Review have published his poems. He lives in Columbia, TN, where, after 32 years, he recently retired from Columbia State Community College.