https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=RjJUdCtJVXRySjlvMHdXakJRRzVmUT09

Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737  Passcode: 678146 Phone: 1 646 876 9923 US (New York)

F. X. Baird was born in Philadelphia, the youngest of 12 children. He studied with David Ignatow at the 92nd Street Y in New York City in the early 80’s and later at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He currently studies with Leonard Gontarek in Philadelphia and conducts a poetry workshop, via email since the pandemic, with long term inmates at Phoenix (formerly Graterford) Prison sponsored by the Prison Literacy Project of Pennsylvania and the Phoenix Lifers organization. Ten poems from five poets from this workshop were published in the Fall 2017 Schuylkill Valley Journal. He received “honorable mention” in the 2019 Sandy Crimmins National Poetry Prize for his poem “Phantom Limb” published in the Spring 2019 edition of Philadelphia Stories. His first chapbook, Painting with my Father.

Liz Chang was 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate in Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Rock & Sling, Origins Journal, Breakwater Review and Stoneboat Literary Journal, among others. Her translations from French appeared in The Adirondack Review. Her 2018 chapbook Animal Nocturne is available from Moonstone Press. She is an Associate Professor of English at Delaware County Community College.

Baird and Chang were inaugural members of the Lansdale Workshop Group, founded in 2010 and sponsored by the Montgomery County Poet Laureate program.

Alina McNeal & Jennifer Hook, Hosts

Open reading follows