Spencer Hupp is a poet and critic from Little Rock. After graduating from Central High School in 2013, Spencer earned his BA at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN where he worked as an assistant editor for the Sewanee Review – the country’s oldest literary quarterly – from 2017 to 2020. He now lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, from which he’ll take an MFA in May 2022. He also serves as a contributing editor to the Hopkins Review and Cortland Review.

Hupp’s poems – at once deadpan and profuse, caustic and rich with sound – deal with the dereliction of rural and suburban spaces, the isolation of people in those spaces, and the decline of vernacular language into jargon and buzzwords, with special attention to the Arkansas of his childhood. Hupp writes under the certain assumption that, as Les Murray said, “we are a language species.” As such, his language spans the widest possble range from detached observation, confession, and a “drawling kind of psychobabble.” Poems, essays and reviews appear or are forthcoming with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sewanee Review, Raritan, the New Criterion, the Honest Ulsterman, Literary Matters, Cortland Review, and the (London) Times Literary Supplement, among others. Hupp was most recently elected to the Johns Hopkins Society of Fellows in the Humanities and named a semifinalist in the 92Y Discovery Contest.

With musical guest The Salty Dogs

Started as a lark retro-country act, the quartet immediately found chemistry, along with a lot of joy, as they dug into their craft. Their sound has expanded over a decade and a half, from uber-twang and purist classic country to equal parts 1954 Nashville, 1961 Bakersfield, and 1972 Everywhere.