Yellow Chair returns! We are delighted to host two wonderful writers for an evening of poetry, conversation, and merriment on Friday, September 13.

We’ll gather in Jon & Hannah’s living room at 7:30 p.m. for drinks, snacks, and poetry. Please RSVP using the form at the bottom of this post, and we will get you location information and directions.

Tania Runyan is an NEA fellow and author of the poetry collections What Will Soon Take Place, Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her first book-length creative nonfiction title, Making Peace With Paradise: An Autobiography of a California Girl, was released in 2022. Tania’s instructional guides, How to Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, and How to Write a Form Poem, are used in classrooms across the country, and her poems have appeared in publications such as Poetry, Image, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, and the Paraclete anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. She lives with her family in Illinois, where she works in educational publishing.

Jeff Munroe is the author of Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding healing and hope in sharing our sadness, grief, trauma, and pain (Reformed Journal Books, 2024) and Reading Buechner (IVP, 2019). He is the editor of The Reformed Journal and an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America.

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Yellow Chair is back! We are delighted to announce the latest in our definitely-not-monthly-but-also-more-than-annual home poetry series …

Two wonderful Midwestern poets help us kick off sweater-and-cider season with a reading on Friday, September 22. We’ll gather in Jon & Hannah’s living room at 7:30 p.m. for drinks, snacks, and poetry. Please RSVP using the form at the bottom of this post, and we will get you location information and directions.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume; her own reviews have been published there and in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her other books include Particular Scandals (Cascade Books, 2013), Slipping Out of Bloom (WordTech Editions, 2010), and the chapbook, Election Day (Finishing Line Press, 2006). Moore has won the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate Magazine, the Editor’s Choice Award from Writecorner Press, and the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance. Moore’s poetry has appeared in hundreds of journals such as African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, Missouri Review Online, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, SWWIM, and Verse Daily. Likewise, her poetry has appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Becoming: What Makes a Woman, published by the University of Nebraska Gender Programs; Every River On Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, published by Ohio University Press; How Higher Education Feels: Commentaries on Poems That Illuminate Emotions in Learning and Teaching, published by Oxford Learning Institute, University of Oxford, UK; Taking Root in the Heart: Thirty-Four Poets from the “Christian Century,” published by Paraclete Press; and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, to be published by Penn State University Press. She lives in Indiana and works at Eastern University for its LifeFlex program as a Senior Online Advisor and Instructor of First Year Composition.

We’re pleased to welcome two West Michigan writers to our living room for the first in our series. Join us on February 28 to hear from fellow Eastown resident Lew Klatt and Holland poet (and Jon’s uncle!) Mark Hiskes.

We’ll gather in Jon & Hannah’s living room at 7:30 p.m. for drinks, snacks, and poetry. Please RSVP using the form at the bottom of this post, and we will get you location information and directions.

L.S. Klatt has served as the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan. He teaches literature and creative writing at Calvin University, where he recently received the Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching. His poems have appeared widely, including such places as Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Poetry Daily, The Believer, Best American Poetry, Image,and The Common. His first book, Interloper, won the Juniper Prize, awarded by the University of Massachusetts Press. His second, Cloud of Ink, garnered the Iowa Poetry Prize from the University of Iowa Press. He is the author of two other collections, Sunshine Wound (Parlor Press, 2014) and The Wilderness After Which (Otis Books, 2017).

Mark Hiskes is the author of Standing with Alyosha (Dos Madres Press, 2019), a collection of poems. He grew up in Chicago, the seventh of eight kids lucky enough to be raised by Harold and Everdean. He has been blessed to be an English teacher for 35 years. When he’s not grading papers, he loves to walk, read, write, hang out in classrooms with students, and refurbish old furniture with Cindy for her antique business. On good days, he manages to do a little of all five. He and Cindy have proudly raised two children, Peter and Mary, who are off on family adventures of their own. Mark and Cindy live near the foxes in Holland, Michigan.