April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, we're having our first open mic night! The event will run from 6-8pm and will have opportunities for students and community members to read their poetry before an audience. We will also have 3 featured published poets who will each read for 10-15 minutes and then hold a Q&A at the end where aspiring poets can learn about the craft and road to publication. Come by the store or fill out this form to sign up for a slot to read a poem! (Spots are limited due to time constraints, but if people are interested, we can make open mic nights a regular event!)
Mario Chard is a poet, critic, translator, and teacher. Born in Morgan Valley, Utah, to an Argentine immigrant mother and an American father, he is a graduate of Weber State University (B.A.) and later Purdue University (M.F.A.), serving there as the poetry editor of Sycamore Review. He is the author of Land of Fire (Tupelo Press, 2018), selected by Robert Pinsky for the 2016 Dorset Prize, named one of the top ten debut poetry books of 2018 by Poets & Writers Magazine, and chosen as the winner of the 2019 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared widely in journals and magazines, including The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, among others, and his honors include a 92NY Discovery Poetry Prize, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. An inaugural fellow for the U.S. Ledbury Poetry Critics, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Valerie A. Smith earned a PhD in English, Creative Writing, Poetry at Georgia State University in 2022. She is a Lecturer of English at Kennesaw State University where she earned a Masters of Professional Writing in 2018. She was a 2022 Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a 2020 Resident at The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts. Her poems appear in Radix, Foothill Poetry Journal, Weber—The Contemporary West, Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor, Typehouse Magazine, Oyster River Pages, Wayne Literary Review, Obsidian, Solstice, Call & Response, Auburn Avenue, South 85, Exit 271: Your Georgia Writers Resource and BlazeVox.
Monica Lee Weatherly is a poet, writer, and Professor of English at Georgia State University (Perimeter College). She is the 2023 winner of Georgia Author of the Year for her chapbook of poetry, It Felt Like Mississippi, a 2023 Key West Literary Seminar Workshop Fellowship recipient, and the 2021 winner of the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Tulane Review, Plainsongs Magazine, Nzuri Journal, Merge Literary Magazine, Obsidian, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Auburn Avenue. She is a member of the Georgia Writers Association and listed in the Georgia Writers Registry. Her writing often focuses on the culture and experiences of women of color in the American South.