This week we welcome KC Trommer. Trommer is the author of “We Call Them Beautiful” (Diode Editions, 2019) and “The Hasp Tongue” (dgp, 2014), as well as the founder of the online audio project Queensbound. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein on a song cycle based on poems from her first collection. In 2021, she was artist in residence through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Covid-19 Response Residency Program and later was poet in residence through Works on Water. Along with Spencer Reece, Jared Harel, and Philip F. Clark, Trommer curates and runs the Red Door Series, a bi-monthly reading and meditation series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens. She is the director of communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights with her son. 
Part of the Queensbound interactive poetry map
Queensbound uses New York City’s subways and an online map to bring poetry to the people. A collaborative audio project of poems written about the borough by poets from the borough, Queensbound connects writers, showcases and helps develop Queens-based literature, and reflects the borough back to itself. Founded in 2018, the project collects poems about Queens—from Long Island City in the East to Jamaica in the West—and embeds audio files of the poems on a redesigned, Vingelli-style Queens-line only subway map, designed by Kyle Richard, housed at www.queensbound.com. By using place-based work and foregrounding the voices of the poets through the use of audio recordings, Queensbound encourages close listening and breaks down the sense of intimidation often associated with poetry. Queensbound has received support from the Queens Council on the Arts, the Queens Museum, and Onassis USA and has been a finalist for a Creative Capital Award, the David Prize, and an NYU Digital Humanities Seed Grant.
In December 2022, Trommer will run the third season of the Red Door Reading Series at St. Mark’s Church in Jackson Heights, a reading and meditation series. The Red Door series was started in 2020 as a weekly series at the church that brought poets from the Queensbound project, along with luminaries that included Pulitzer Prize winners, to read a single poem, followed by a 10-minute silent meditation, closing with a second reading of the same poem. The series is free and open to the public and will resume in December as a monthly series, held on the second Wednesday of the month. Follow @red_door_series_jh on Instagram.
