Word of Mouth Cincinnati, a literary event consisting of both an open mic and a feature performance, runs the last Tuesday of every month at 7:00 pm in MOTR Pub’s Sword Room.

This month’s featured performer on April 28 is Brian Richards of Portsmouth, Ohio. 

Poetry has been the dominant force in Richards’ life for well over fifty years. After earning a B.A. from Bowling Green University, he attended the University of Massachusetts as a poetry fellow in the later 60s, worked in the logging industry in the Olympic Mountains in Western Washington. He returned to Ohio and homesteaded in Adams County’s Shawnee Forest, where he has lived for the last forty years. He has been a letterpress printer and sole proprietor of Bloody Twin Press. His books include Loose Fish (Black Book), Early Elegies (Bloody Twin), Only Then May The Day Be Kept (Pavement Saw), andEnridged (University of New Orleans), as well as a variety of broadsides and pamphlets.

Word of Mouth Cincinnati (WoMC) is co-hosted by fellow writers Jim Palmarini and Mark Flanigan. It was founded in memory of the late Aralee Strange who, after many years living, writing and producing work in the Cincinnati area, moved to Athens, Georgia where she co-founded Athens Word of Mouth, a popular reading series there.

WoMC, according to its website, is “an intentional arc of both past and future utterance, inspired by our most revered voice, with a nod to her Athens, GA compatriots. Word of Mouth asks poets to Show Up, Mouth Off and Pay Attention.”