Call & Response Poetry with Collin Kelley and Karen Head

Poetry Atlanta and Georgia Center for the Book present poets Collin Kelley and Karen Head with a new edition of their popular "Call & Response" reading. "Call & Response" will feature Head and Kelley reading their poetry round-robin style, selecting poems on the fly to find common themes, moods and imagery. It’s a fun, experimental and unexpected evening of poetry because the audience–and the poets–aren’t sure what’s coming next. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

This event will take place in the Decatur Library Auditorium, on the Ground Floor of Decatur Library. Please park on the lower level of the parking garage and enter through those doors. You may also enter through the main level of the library and take the elevators to "G." Doors and elevators will be unlocked at 6:30.

About the Poets:

Karen J. Head is the author of Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (a nonfiction book about issues in contemporary higher education), as well as six books of poetry (What We Missed: New & Selected Works with translations in German and French; Lost on Purpose; Sassing: My Paris Year; Shadow Boxes; and On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year). She also co-edited the poetry anthologies Mother Mary Comes to Me: An Anthology of Popular Culture and Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Poetry, and has exhibited several acclaimed digital poetry projects, including her project “Monumental” (part of Antony Gormley’s One and Other Project) which was detailed in a TIME online mini-documentary. Her poetry appears in a number of national and international journals and anthologies. In 2010 she won the Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Prize. She is editor emerita of the international poetry journal Atlanta Review. On a more unusual note, she is currently the Poet Laureate of Waffle House—a title that reflects an outreach program to bring arts awareness to rural high schools in Georgia, which has been generously sponsored by the Waffle House Foundation. She was the inaugural Poet Laureate of Fulton County, Georgia. She is the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, and Professor of English and World Languages, at Augusta University. For twenty years, Head has been a visiting artist and scholar at the Institute for American Studies at Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany.

Collin Kelley is an award-winning poet, novelist, editor and journalist from Atlanta. His latest work is Wonder & Wreckage: New & Selected Poems, 1993-2023. With Megan Volpert, he is the co-editor of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology forthcoming from Madville Publishing in 2026. Find out more at www.collinkelley.com.