A poetry reading centered on themes of mortality, memory, and love featuring Matthew W. Baker, Lisa Huffaker, and Oliver Sheppard.

Part of Deep Vellum’s Deep Ellum Block Party activations with Deep Ellum Art Row.

Matthew W. Baker writes and lives in Texas where he is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Dallas and works as a bookseller and publishing assistant at Deep Vellum. His research focuses on aesthetics and contemporary U.S. poetry. He is also the author of the chapbook Undoing the Hide’s Taut Musculature (FLP 2019), and other craft essays, reviews, and poems appear or will appear in The Missouri Review, Pinch, Sine Qua Non, Gulf Stream Magazine, Cleaver, and The Southern Review, among others.

Lisa Huffaker integrates poetry, visual art, and performance in hybrid forms. Her poetry appears in The Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Cincinnati Review, Sixth Finch, and many other journals. Pegasus Contemporary Ballet choreographed a new dance work built on her poetry as a live score, and Pierce Planetarium featured her hybrid of poetry, full-dome art projections, and music. In collaboration with the Writer's Garret, she creates community-engaged writing projects, including Poetry In Place, an ongoing public workshop held along the Trinity River. Her artwork can be seen at Ro2 Gallery.

Oliver Sheppard is a Dallas poet, translator, and scholar of Gothic and horror literature. He is the author of *Thirteen Nocturnes* (2018), a 2020 Elgin Award finalist long-listed for the Bram Stoker Award, and *The Funeral Colony* (2025). He publishes *Twilight of Humanity*, a Substack devoted to his translations of German Expressionist poetry.