This poetry-reading event takes place at the Ohio Arts Council's Riffe Gallery in downtown Columbus in celebration of Arts and Humanities Month. Ohio poets Katie Daley, Wendy McVicker, and Andy Roberts read their original poetry, and Ohio Poetry Out Loud Champion Emily Carnevale performs selections from the POL anthology as well as her own compositions. Ohio poet Chiquita Mullins Lee emcees the event.

Katie Daley is a seasoned veteran of four National Poetry Slams, and in 2004, she won third place in the World Competition of the Canadian Wordlympics in Ottawa. Since the summer of 2001, Katie and her inner quintet of characters have been hitting the road on a regular basis to bring Full Blast Alive: Voices from the Ruby Side, her one-woman show of poetic monologues, to various venues around the USA and Canada. Her work has been published in various journals and anthologies and she has produced a CD of her show, as well as three chapbooks: Red Hot Mangoes and Voodoo Juice (2000), Coyote at the Wheel (2003) and Venus and the Hitchhikers (2007). In 2003, Katie received an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and in 2004, she was the Summer Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She is also the recipient of a 2006 Individual Creativity Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.

Andy Roberts is a poet and guitarist from Columbus, Ohio who makes his living as an accountant and social worker. His poems have appeared in hundreds of small press publications and literay journals and his chapbook "Who's On My Land?" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2009. His latest chapbook is "Ghost Notes & Candle Smoke" from Pudding House Publications.

Wendy McVicker lives and writes in the green hills of southeastern Ohio. She is a teaching artist and field consultant with the Ohio Arts Council's Arts Learning program, and for more than 20 years has enjoyed stirring up poetry with people of all ages in a variety of settings (schools, libraries, arts centers, hospitals, prisons). Her poems have been appearing in small journals since 1986.

Emily Carnevale was born in Columbus, Ohio. She has received the Denison Book Award and has contributed her prose and poetry to The Ohio State University's Young Writers Workshop's anthology Small Actions and Words. She has recited published works for the Poetry Out Loud competition and has performed her original works for the CCS Slam Poetry competition, which contributed to Centennial's 2011 championship. Continuing her senior year of study at Centennial High School, Emily hopes to explore the possibilities of communication through performance, art, media and the written word.

Chiquita Mullins Lee is the project coordinator for Ohio's Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest and she serves as a teaching artist for the Ohio Arts Council's Artist-in Residence program. Chiquita won individual artist fellowships from the Greater Columbus Arts Council in fiction and playwriting and artist excellence awards from the Ohio Arts Council in fiction and non-fiction. She wrote and performs in Faces of Grace, a solo piece about women from the Bible, and To Hear Ruby Sing, a stage presentation based on the biography of operatic soprano Ruby Elzy. Chiquita co-wrote 12, a three-woman show about girls on the threshold of womanhood, and Myrlie, Coretta and Betty: the Mothers of the Civil Rights Movement, in which she plays Coretta Scott King. Her work appears in various literary journals and she has been nominated for a Push Cart Prize.