Live Poetry with Jon Lawrence, MJ McGinn, VA Smith, and Amy Beth Sission

Wednesday January 15, 2025 – 7:00pm

Live at Fergie’s Pub,1214 Sansom Street

Or register for Zoom here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEscOiprj4vHN0alIAMAjPkfzE1D9sbPaZe

Jon Lawrence currently teaches high school English and Creative Writing in his hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He received an MFA in Creative Writing at the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. He is the author of the chapbook A Phrase Which Becomes Us (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and his poetry and reviews have been published in Newfound, American Writers Review, The Bangalore Review, Wild Roof Journal, and others.

MJ McGinn received his MFA from Adelphi University and was a VCCA resident in 2019. His work has been included in the Wigleaf 50 best very short stories and has previously appeared in the Guernica/PEN Flash Series, Necessary Fiction, Lost Balloon, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, LIT Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches middle school in Philadelphia.

VA Smith, author of Biking Through the Stone Age and American Daughters, is a frequent Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and in dozens of literary journals, among them: Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review and Burningword Literary Journal. A former Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence awardee at Penn State University as a Professor of Teaching in The Department of English, VA gigs now as Poetry Editor at River Heron Review.

Amy Beth Sisson lives near the skunk cabbages in a town outside of Philly. Her poetry has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, The Night Heron Barks, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, Philadelphia Stories, The Shoutflower, Hot Pink Magazine, and others. She received her MFA in poetry from Rutgers University Camden in 2023 and was a 2024 Peter Taylor Fellow with the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops. She is an Associate Artist with the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and is an Editorial and Special Projects Assistant for Fence Publishers.

Sean Hanrahan Host – Open Reading Follows