Poets In The Gardens: Featuring Ag, With Jake Budenz

We’re thrilled to bring back Poets in the Gardens to host former Ivy bookseller Ag in celebration of his poetry chapbook, blood physical surgical sacrifices! Join us for an afternoon of poetry and conversation surrounded by the green of the gardens, where Ag will read and discuss his poetry in conversation with beloved Baltimore-based author and artist Jake Budenz, author of Tea Leaves.

Books (and refreshments!) will be available at this event.

Click here to RSVP!

Ag is a poet and librarian. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from Wellesley College and a Master’s in Library Science from the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in The Madrigal, Variety Pack, Full Mood Mag and Transfag Quarterly. Born and raised in Annapolis, Maryland, he currently resides in Rhode Island, but Baltimore will always be home to him. His work is transgressive and transsexual, concerned with bodies and their functions in private and in public. When not writing he enjoys horror films and documentaries about the deep ocean. His favorite cephalopod is the magnapinna squid.

Jacob Budenz is a queer author, multi-disciplinary performer, and witch with an MFA from University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins University whose work explores the intersection of queer otherness and the otherworldly. The author of queer magic realist short story collection Tea Leaves (Bywater Books 2023) and poetry chapbook Pastel Witcheries (Seven Kitchens Press 2018), Budenz has work in print journals including Slipstream and Assaracus; zeitgeisty online journals including Taco Bell Quarterly and Wussy Mag; and anthologies by Mason Jar Press, Unbound Edition, and more. Jake’s work has earned a Baker Innovative Projects Grant (Simaetha: a Dreambaby Cabaret, January 2020), a spot on Baltimore City Paper’s Top Ten Staged Productions of 2016 (for a new adaptation of The Master and Margarita), and praise including “fabulous, in every sense… quick and sharp, full of charms that whisk us into the darkest forests of the human condition” (Baynard Woods, Inheritance: an Autobiography of Whiteness) and “funny… queer, and… full of life” (M.M. Carrigan, editor-in-chief of Taco Bell Quarterly). You can follow Jake’s projects, including their queer psychedelic pop band on Instagram (@dreambabyjake and @mothbrothband) or www.jakebeearts.com.