The Poets’ Roundtable workshops are free and open to the public. All attendees are asked to register on EventBrite.

Tickets for the workshops plus lunch will cost $15. Tickets for the workshops only are free, but those attendees are advised to bring a sack lunch.

Click here to register.

Parking is free at the Library of Michigan on the weekends in the large surface lot off Kalamazoo Street south of the Library.

Click here to view/download the event flyer.

About the Poets

Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd is a renowned poet, scholar, and community maker with deep roots in Michigan creative communities. Her work is rooted in Detroit. She began her career as an assistant editor to Dudley Randall, founder of the legendary Broadside Press. She has gone on to publish 13 books, including nine books of poetry, and a series of scholarly monographs which illuminate Black creative history. She is Distinguished Professor in African American Studies at Wayne State University, and a recipient of Kresge Arts Detroit’s 2023 Eminent Artist Award. She was named Michigan’s third Poet Laureate in February 2025.

Laura Apol is an internationally published poet and writer and an associate professor at Michigan State University, where she teaches creative writing and children’s/young adult literature. She is the author of several prize-winning collections of poetry, including Nothing but the Blood, winner of the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry and a silver-medal winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award, and A Fine Yellow Dust, winner of the Midwest Book Award and the Phillip McMath Award for Poetry. Her newest poetry collection, cauterized, was released in 2024. Laura has conducted writing-for-healing workshops in a number of national and international contexts, and her recent publication, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry, and Rwanda: Engaging with the Lives of Others (Springer International, 2021) focuses on arts-based inquiry, international collaboration, and the therapeutic uses of writing in response to trauma. From 2019-2021, Laura served as the Lansing-area Poet Laureate, and she continues to do readings and workshops for writers of all ages and levels of experience.

Esther Belin, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is the inaugural poet laureate of Durango, Colorado (2024–2026) as well as a 2025 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She calls the region just east of Dibé Ntsaa, the northern boundary mountain of Dinétah, her home. She has two collections of poetry: From the Belly of My Beauty and Of Cartography, and is a co-editor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, which received the American Book Award. She is the Leslie Endowed Chair in North American Indian and Indigenous Literary Studies at Michigan State University.

Sarah Carson's poetry and other writing have appeared in The Rumpus, The Slowdown, Guernica, The Missouri Review, and The Christian Century, among others. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (Persea Books, 2022), winner of the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. She has been a recipient of and finalist for grants and fellowships from Tin House, the Poetry Foundation, the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, and the Michigan and Illinois Arts Councils. Born in Flint, Michigan, she now lives in East Lansing, where she is at work on a memoir about single motherhood, work, and the rules that govern the universe.

Anita Skeen is Professor Emerita in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) at Michigan State University and founding director of the RCAH Center for Poetry, where she is Series Editor for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. She is the author of six volumes of poetry: Each Hand A Map (1986); Portraits (1990); Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame (1999); The Resurrection of the Animals (2002); Never the Whole Story (2011); When We Say Shelter (2007), with Oklahoma poet Jane Taylor; as well as The Unauthorized Audubon (2014), and Even the Least of These (2024), two collections of poems by Skeen and linocuts by anthropologist/visual artist Laura B. DeLind in conversation with one another.