CHESTERTOWN, MD—The Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College hosts its second Poetry Salon of the summer on Tuesday, June 23, at 4:30 p.m., featuring readings by poets Kamilah Aisha Moon and Vandana Khanna, music from The Chestertown Ukulele Club and light refreshments. Made possible with support from the Douglass Wallop Fund, the event is free and open to the public. 

Kamilah Aisha Moon’s work has been featured widely, including in Harvard Review, jubilat, the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” series, Oxford American, Callaloo, Villanelles, and Gathering Ground. A Pushcart Prize winner, she was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle. Moon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of She Has a Name (Four Way Books). She is in residence in Chestertown for the month of June as the Lit House’s 2015 Cave Canem Fellow. 

Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India and attended the University of Virginia and Indiana University, where she earned her MFA. Her first collection, Train to Agra, won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize and her second collection, Afternoon Masala, was co-winner of the 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. Ms. Khanna’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in journals that include Crazyhorse, Callaloo, and The Indiana Review, as well as the anthologies Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. She writes and teaches in Los Angeles.

Hosted by Jamie Hurley and with musical direction from Ford Schumann, The Chestertown Ukulele Club was organized in early 2013 and plays a range of repertoire, from ’40s standards to The Grateful Dead. The club, whose motto is “You can’t be sad playing the ukulele,” performs on the last Wednesday of each month as part of Open Mic events at the Garfield Center for the Arts. With about 25 active members of all skill levels, they always welcome new players. The ukulele was born in Hawaii of Portuguese roots in the late 1800s, and this year marks the 100th anniversary of its leap into popular culture during the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition of 1915 in San Francisco.  

For more information on this and other upcoming literary events, visit http://www.washcoll.edu/centers/lithouse/.