December 18, 2025

The Jack Straw Writers Program was created in 1997. Each year an invited curator (for 2025, Kathleen Alcalá) selects twelve writers as fellows in the program, which provides voice and presentation training, in-studio interviews, public readings, a published anthology, and podcasts. Tonight’s reading features three Jack Straw poets: Bill Hollands, Nhatt Nichols, and Connor Watkins-Xu.

See Facebook event.

Bill Hollands’s recent poems have appeared in such journals as The Adroit Journal, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Rattle, The Florida Review, Diagram, Boulevard, and Plume, as well as on The Slowdown podcast. His debut poetry collection, Mangrove, was published in the fall of 2025.

Nhatt Nichols is a multidisciplinary journalist, poet, and artist whose work focuses on the intersections of humans, animals, and their environment. Her first book, the graphic poem This Party of the Soft Things, is awaiting its third printing. Her first novella, Burn Morels, is forthcoming.

Connor Watkins-Xu’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, North American Review, Redivider, Columbia Journal, Gargoyle, The Hong Kong Review, Salvation South, and elsewhere. His manuscript has been named a semifinalist for the Berkshire Prize and The Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry.