Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading

The Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund honors CTY (Center for Talented Youth) alumnus and avid poetry lover Joshua Ringel and his parents, Mel and Barbara. The fund supports the arts in Baltimore by bringing a distinguished poet to the city each year for a free public poetry reading.

Josh's teacher, the renowned poet Kenneth Koch, gave the inaugural Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading in 1998. Since then, many other distinguished poets including Terrance Hayes, Naomi Shihab Nye, Natasha Tretheway, Billy Collins, John Ashbery, and Sharon Olds have lent their voices to this remarkable series. A gift from Josh's father in 2004 created an endowment at Johns Hopkins, with a goal of sustaining the reading in perpetuity.

Learn more about Joshua Ringel and how to support the fund.

2025 Featured Poet: Rita Dove

Rita Dove served as US Poet Laureate from 1993–1995. Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the 2023 honorary National Book Award, she also received the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama. Other recent honors are the 2021 Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where she currently serves as vice president for literature, a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation and both the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award and the 2024 Leadership Award from the Academy of American Poets. Among her numerous books are Thomas and Beulah, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, Sonata Mulattica, Playlist for the Apocalypse, and Collected Poems 1974-2004. Her drama The Darker Face of the Earth was staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and the National Theatre in London, and her song cycles with composers John Williams, Tania Leon, Richard Danielpour and others were performed at Tanglewood in Boston, Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center. Rita Dove teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

Event Details

Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading with Rita Dove 
Sunday, March 30, 2025
2:00 p.m. – Doors open
2:30 p.m. – Reading starts
3:30 p.m. – Book signing

Baltimore Museum of Art Meyerhoff Auditorium
10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218

Past Series Poets