By Our Nature’s concurrent poetry reading is on Wednesday, September 16, at Hopkins Hall Gallery (1st floor). The event will feature the works of four Columbus-based queer poets: Ruth Awad, Connor Beeman, Misha Ponnuraju, and Mandy Shunnarah.
RSVP for the Free Event
About the Poets
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American disabled poet, a 2021 NEA Poetry fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy (Third Man Books, 2024) and Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2020). She is also the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work is widely anthologized, most recently appearing in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by Ada Limón, and can be found in The Atlantic, AGNI, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Appalachian-Palestinian writer in Columbus, Ohio. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in 2024 from Belt Publishing, and their second book, We Had Mansions: Poems, a Finalist for the Ohio Book Award, was published by Diode Editions in 2025. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.
Connor Beeman is an Ohio poet who writes about place, queerness, and transformation. He writes his poems in conversation with the land and waters that raised him, often fracturing sites of memory or crafting reimaginings of our relationship to nature. Sometimes, in his poems, people turn into deer. More their work can be found in Foglifter, Passages North, and on poets.org.
Misha Ponnuraju is a writer and photographer from San Bernardino, California. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University where she also served as Managing Editor of The Journal. Misha is the recipient of the Arthur Rense Prize, Helen Earnhart Harley Poetry Fellowship Award, and the Vandewater Poetry Award. Find her work at Poets.org, Shade Literary, Sho Poetry Journal, and Poet Lore. Her poems illuminate the strange and spectacular within the mundane through scenes of domesticity, exploring Asian womanhood and queerness.
“Photographing myself became a refusal to disappear.” – Jo Birdsell
In By Our Nature, Jo Birdsell navigates the changing political reality for queer people in the United States. As both land and body become sites of major political suppression, Birdsell relates to their own queerness by planting themselves firmly in the landscape of the rural United States.
Beginning in Birdsell’s hometown and the surrounding rural landscape of the Appalachian
region, Birdsell’s photographs capture the interplay between vulnerable identities and vulnerable locations. Through travel across the “Amerikan” West and Southwest, By Our Nature expanded, cementing itself firmly in the post-documentary canon. The photographs in this series play with color, form, and location. They seek to capture intimate moments of daily, queer life, while drawing on principles of classical portrait photography and queer archival lineages.
Through this showing of By Our Nature, Birdsell invites other artists—Anton Bou, Taylor Nice, Coyote Park, and Lauren Buck Withrow—to share their unique perspectives on queerness. Together, the artists work to naturalize queerness and assert queer people’s right to take up space, asking the audience to consider what’s next, both from queer Amerikans and for Amerikan nature.
Reception: Friday, August 21, 4:00–5:30 PM at Hopkins Hall Gallery
Music Performance: September 3, 6–8 PM at Hopkins Hall Gallery, featuring Clever Space Plants, DJ Samir, Leo Vance, and Moe Reen
Reading Event: September 16, 6–8 PM at Hopkins Hall Gallery, featuring Ruth Awad, Connor Beeman, Misha Ponnuraju, and Mandy Shunnarah
Participating Artists: Jo Birdsell, Anton Bou, Taylor Nice, Coyote Park, and Lauren Buck Withrow
Visiting Hopkins Hall Gallery
128 North Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210
Hours of operation
Monday–Friday: 11 AM–4 PM
