Poetry Open Mic Featuring Pamela Sumners

Featured Poet: Pamela Sumners
Pamela Sumners’ work has been published or recognized by about 50 journals or publishing houses in the US and abroad in 2018-22. She was a 2018 and 2022 Pushcart nominee and was selected by Halcyone/Black Mountain Press for inclusion in 64 Best Poets of 2018 and 2019 as well as nominated for 50 Best in 2021. Her first poetry collection, Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones, was published by UnCollected Press in December 2020, and her second collection, Etiquette for a Pandemic, was published in 2021. Her first chapbook, Finding Helen, a winner in the Rane Arroyo Series of Seven Kitchens Press, was released in 2021.

Sumners is well known for her constitutional and civil rights legal work, including cases opposing Jay Sekulow, Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore, Supreme Court wannabe Bill Pryor, and an Alabama governor who argued that the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to Alabama. She formerly worked as an ACLU volunteer lawyer, the director of the LGBT Project at the ACLU of Illinois, and the executive director of a women’s rights organization. A native Alabamian, she now lives in St. Louis with her wife and some rescue dogs while empty-nesting about a kid who went off to college. She also feeds various wildlife and strays in Tower Grove South.