The Openest Mic Featuring Brian Mosher & Fred Gerhard

The poet, Fred Gerhard, recently published his mother’s poetry and will be reading from her works as well as his own.

In 2026, Fred Gerhard, author of Drifting to “Hello” (Khotso, 2023) and Lilacs Still Bloom in Ashburnham (Local Gems, 2023), will be reading his poems and poems from the recently published posthumous collection from his mother, Rena Gerhard, The Loving: Selected Poems (Petronella Press, 2026).

Rena, who died in 2014 wrote poetry for over five decades in Pennsylvania. Her work is well-crafted and insightful whether writing about love, family, God, or surviving brain cancer.

Fred is widely published in magazines and anthologies. He is a winner of the Art on the Trails competition (2024) and the Poetry in the Pines competition (2023). He is also an editor at Quabbin Quills and Smoky Quartz.

Praise for Fred’s and Rena’s poetry:

“The poems in this welcome collection of Fred Gerhard’s work range considerably: from Victorian rooms to the Pennsylvania and New England landscapes he knows intimately; from the psychology of inner experience to the dance of interpersonal relationships; from the noise of the trains that run through all of our lives (and occasionally crash into walls) to the quiet of the ‘dark grape taste of twilight.’  Likewise, Gerhard’s diverse poetic techniques run the gamut from lucid and conversational free verse to skillful and musical rhyme.  Throughout, he crafts memorable lines and indelible images, giving (as he puts it in his tribute to Edgar Allan Poe) ‘consonant to forlorn sound’—and to the sound of joy.”

—Simon Hunt, author of Lesser Magi and Endlings

“As the middle of the Twentieth Century approached, a young woman near Reading, Pennsylvania, took up poetry keenly aware of the thick, heavy glass ceiling hovering over every line she wrote…

The silence seems too tense.
One fears to breathe in case one might
Thus doing, cause offense.    

…she quietly kept at it, quietly riding that horse, as she notes in ‘Strange Steed’:

When the wise had gone to bed
To receive their well-earned rest,
Then I watched him as he fed,
And I sat his back, a guest
Instead.”

—Rodger Martin, author of The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec, The Nemo Poems: A Martian Perspective, The Blue Moon Series, and For All the Tea in Zhōngguó

“It is an honor to read Rena Gerhard’s poems, to touch in after decades with her precision of imagination and her encounters with daily life, laced with the generosity and intimacy of a ‘trembling heart.’ I love how Gerhard envisions herself standing ‘at the door of a dark night’ and whistling as ‘the beautiful words come running.’ Yet she also wrote herself through suffering. She recognized that she would have to ‘look through the hollows between the words.’  This memorial volume edited by her son, the poet Fred Gerhard, will stand as an enduring achievement.”

—Heather H. Thomas, author of Vortex Street (FutureCycle Press, 2018)and former editor of Musings, poetry column, Reading Eagle newspaper