Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading

The Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund honors CTY 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.

2026 Featured Poet: Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady is the author of eight poetry collections, including Hardheaded Weather, nominated for an NAACP Image Award; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and his most recent collection, The War Against the Obvious. He is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has received its 2025 Wallace Stevens Award. He cofounded Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poets. Eady is also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy; and the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. He has taught at SUNY Stony Brook, where he directed the Poetry Center, and at other institutions such as Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Missouri–Columbia. Currently, he is the Chair of Excellence in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Event Details

Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading with Cornelius Eady 
Sunday, April 26, 2026
2 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

Registration preferred. This event is free and open to the public.

Register Now

Past Series Poets