PW Covington with Tom Murphy, and Nathan Brown

PW Covington returns to the Beat Museum for a reading with Tom Murphy and Nathan Brown.

PW Covington, Tom Murphy, Nathan Brown

PW Covington, Tom Murphy, Nathan Brown

PW Covington writes in the Beat tradition of the North American highway. Born in the high desert, near the end of historic Route 66, PW is a 100% service-connected disabled veteran. Between time spent wandering and exploring, time spent incarcerated in county jails and state prisons, along his wayward path from Pensacola to Puget Sound, he has found work as a deckhand on oilfield supply vessels, as airline ground crew, and as a retail store-detective. He has worked day labor construction in the Las Vegas housing boom and has volunteered at the Standing Rock protests. Covington has worked as a mental health peer facilitator and general manager of a franchised pizza restaurant. Covington has been invited to share his work from Woodstock, New York, to the Havana International Poetry Festival in Cuba. He has captivated and engaged audiences from the headwaters of the Rio Grande in Colorado to Brownsville, in the Rio Grande Valley of Deep South Texas. Originally assigned to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, in uniform during the early 1990s, PW has lived in the International District of New Mexico’s largest city, full time, since 2017. Covington has been invited to share poetry with local Grateful Dead tribute bands during public performances, and often works on locally produced television and film projects such as Better Call Saul and The Cleaning Lady. His latest collection of poetry is malepoet., published in 2021, by woman owned, woman run, Gnashing Teeth Publishing.


Tom Murphy was born in Redwood City and grew up in Palo Alto. He studied creative writing at SF State, where he had an internship at the Poetry Center in the fall of 1993 with Rosemary Catacalos and Arron Shurin. He graduated in ’94, and earned an MA from Sonoma State in ’96. He was kicked out of the PhD program at Texas A&M University. Worked with Floyd Salas, Gillian Conoley, Paul Christiansen and Jonah Raskin. Had classes with Jerry Rosen, Francis Mayes, Robert Gluck, and Nanos Valoaritis. He was Poet Laureate of Corpus Christi in 2021 and 2022. His most recent collection is When I Wear Bob Kaufman’s Eyes.


Nathan Brown is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a PhD in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma where he’s taught for over 20 years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14, and now travels full time performing readings, concerts, and workshops. Nathan has published 26 books. Most recent is his new collection of poems, In the Days of Our Endurance, the fifth in a series now known as the Pandemic Poems Project, a collection of commissioned poems that deal with the days of the pandemic, and a travel memoir Just Another Honeymoon in France: A Vagabond at Large. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the Oklahoma Book Award.