The circle that began
long before
it had a name.
MuseVerse Circle was founded in November 2024. But its roots reach back much further, to a child sitting in a circle, listening. What follows is that story.
Before the circle had a name, it had a question.
As a little girl, I remember sitting in a circle, listening to my grandma share stories. Those stories became a torch in my young mind, guiding, questioning, illuminating. Through them, I learned how to see. How to imagine life beyond my own immediate viewpoint. How to feel my way around the world.
What happens when we listen across languages? What happens when we gather around the fire of poetry, to witness rather than to perform?
These questions became a longing. A longing for poetry that speaks and lives. For a gathering that allows us to understand the world through the lens of verse. For conversations that are slow, soulful, and wide enough to hold contradiction and beauty side by side.
MuseVerse Circle is a return to the circle I sat in as a child. The voices now come from many directions. The stories are shaped by culture, inheritance, cadence, and reclamation. Here we hold space for poems and for people.
Some longings take time to find their room.
How we know. What we hold to be true.
That a poem heard in its original language carries knowledge that translation can approach but never fully hold. That the body knows before the mind names it. That shared listening, across distance and across difference, is itself a form of understanding.
We do not explain poems. We sit with them until they open.
A circle with no end. A space where language arrives in its original weight and is received without reduction. A community built on the conviction that every voice, every tradition, every tongue belongs, not as a gesture of inclusion, but as a structural truth.
The circle has no hierarchy. Only more chairs.
Where the circle found
its first room.
I arrived at Red Dirt Studio ceremonially late, after a long hike through the landscape. A flock of artists welcomed me in to make art, to write. I met Margaret Boozer. I stayed. What began as an invitation to create became a poetry residency. I remain a Dirtier.
Red Dirt Studio sits at 4051 34th Street in Mount Rainier, Maryland. It was here that MuseVerse Circle held its first gathering, then its second, then its third.
Visit Red Dirt StudioWhere the circle found
its second home.
A bookshop holds what a studio makes.
Kensington Row Bookshop opened in 2002 under the care of Elisenda Sola-Sole. It lives at 3786 Howard Avenue in Kensington, Maryland. It is a bookshop built from conviction, from the belief that language deserves a permanent address.
Visit Kensington Row BookshopThe circle does not close.
It grows by one chair at a time.
What 2026 holds is still becoming. New gatherings are announced as they take shape. If you have found your way here, you are already part of what comes next.
Join the Circle