Live Book Release: Open Source by Warren C. Longmire, hosted by Sean Lynch

Wednesday December 15, 2021 – 7pm 

Live at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street and on Zoom

Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIlf-mgpzwpHdZZB3CAIOVCXQ-8utbL0yWr

“OPEN SOURCE is a book we’ve been waiting for in Philly, from a poet who can sing its songs through smog and shame with such tender aplomb that it makes me wanna wander these streets we share in search of myself, in search of us. This book be its own city of errant and ecstatic bodies.” –Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro, Philadelphia Poet Laureate 2016-2017

Selected from two decades of work, the poetry in Warren C. Longmire’s OPEN SOURCE chronicles the complexities of language, identity, love and time. Ranging widely in style, with a lyric intensity rooted in the Philly landscape, this book reveals the interconnections between public and private history, a black man’s daily struggle for self-acceptance and joy amidst “disastrous news and the grace/of each of arc of decay.” Longmire addresses work in the tech industry as well as the gentrifying city as it grinds through a pandemic. At times raw, playful, painful and technical, OPEN SOURCE is poetry alert to the particulars and subtle shifts from day to day in uncertain times, unafraid to grapple with the past inside the present.

Warren C. Longmire is a writer, educator, software engineer and human from North Philadelphia. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee and the co-founder of the Excellano Project Spoken Word Collective. He is a former contributing editor for Apiary Magazine, Director of Poetry Events for Blue Stoop and Programming Manager for the Nick Virgilio Haiku Society. Poems featured in this collection have been published in Stone Fruit, American Poetry Review, Bedfellows, Prolit, Voicemail Poems and The Best American Poetry 2021. Open Source is his first full-length book.

Sean Lynch Host, Open Reading Follows