Dear readers,
The writing included Oxeye Reader 3: Cincinnati represents a kind of micro-snapshot of a particular time and place, rather than a comprehensive survey of a city or even of a cohesive scene. As the editors of this issue, we mainly focused our lens of inclusion around the Domestic Water Reading series, which Harris started in 2021 and continues to host at Conveyor Belt Books in Covington, Kentucky, just across the river from downtown Cincinnati. Over the past four years, that series has been for many of us a space to hear (and try out) new work and meet new people, and a welcome excuse to gather with friends more regularly. We approached editing this issue with a similar curatorial philosophy: Who’s around? Who’s writing and sharing work and showing up to hear and read the work of others in town? Who’s putting on readings? Rather than organize the issue by grouping the work of each contributor discretely, we decided to try to order the writing in ways that might tease out unexpected relationships—generative frictions and weird harmonies—between pieces. This process was somewhat intuitive/associative and involved a lot of pleasurable conversations over piles of pages spread out on the living room floor.
Many, though not all, of the writers included were readers and/or listeners at Domestic Water. That said, there are so many other reading series and venues doing similar important work: Word of Mouth, Dogeared Writers’ Collective, Small Bite Poetry Night at Juniper’s, Waxy Gibbon, Poetry Stacked! and The Elliston Room readings at UC; readings at Mean Street Gallery, The Comet, Downbound Books (thanks, Greg!), Household Books, the Mercantile Library, Miami University, Xavier University, and Art Academy of Cincinnati, to name just a few.
Cincinnati has ongoingly rich and active (and overlapping) literary communities, which intersect variously with all kinds of music and visual arts culture. It seems to us that one quality of the social life around writing in Cincinnati is that, perhaps because of the size of the city, friendships and affinities between writers or groups of writers seem to arise less out of specific aesthetic concerns than they do out of a general desire to foster an environment where opportunities to make and hear writing are possible. It’s not baked in, not given, and therefore it isn’t taken for granted. As a result, the atmosphere around writing here feels uniquely warm, porous and supportive.
We’re incredibly grateful to these and so many other people and places that contribute to a lively and diverse communal net of writers, readers, listeners, and attention-givers of all important kinds.
— Brett Price & Harris Wheeler
Tommy Ballard is a writer and artist who enjoys rhythmic and surrealist ways of experimenting with language. Tommy is from the Ohio Valley region and is a graduate of the creative writing program at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Megan Freshley (she/her) is a poet based in Cincinnati, OH. Her poems have appeared in Blush Lit, Witch Craft Magazine, Portland Review, and others. A graduate of Antioch College and the Esalen Institute, She earned an MFA from Portland State University, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize. She has served on the editorial teams at Tin House and McSweeney’s Poetry Series. The Hunger Press published her first chapbook, Hypnic Jerk, in 2021 as a winner of the Tiny Fork Chapbook Contest.
Megan Martin is the author of the tiny prose collections NEVERS (Caketrain 2014) and Sparrow & Other Eulogies (Gold Wake 2011), and the chapbook-novella MISSING AMERICA (Shirt Pocket 2017, co-written with Shawn Huelle). She loves cats and roller skating and teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Colin Russell was born and raised in West Virginia. He currently lives in Brooklyn. Prior to, he was in Richmond, VA for nine years, where many dear friends were made. He made friends in Cincinnati before New York as well, most specially his mother’s cat Peter.
Evan Thomas is a poet who lives and works in southern Ohio. His first full-length collection, Strangers, won the Prize Americana in poetry for 2024 and was published in the spring of 2025.