Moonstone Poetry @ the Pub

Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street

Wednesday May 30, 2018 – 7pm

Hive Night @ Fergie’s Pub

HIVE NIGHT is Apiary Magazine’s showcase and open mic celebrating every stripe of literary artist the city has to offer. Come to hear voices from Philadelphia writing tribes old and new, spanning Apiary’s decade-long history. Stay to share your own work in a laidback, inclusive space, whatever the form, genre or mood, to a crowd hungry for diverse voices.

Meg Pendoley (Apiary 9) is a writer living in West Philadelphia. She is interested in queer homes (bodies, housers, neighborhoods), the boundaries they share, and how what happens here might be recorded, kept. Her work appears in Cleaver Magazine and on Tin House’s Open Bar.

Alex Smith (Apiary 8) is a queer black activist, poet, dj, actor, musician, afro punk/afro-futurist chronicler of the naughty universe. Smith’s work speaks to the edge, to the post-fringe dystopia slowly creeping upon us. Too cantankerous and flamboyant for the Saul Williams wanna-be/def poetry set, too tribal for academia, Smith paints viral inscriptions for an audience of armed pixie insurrectionists. He is the founder and curator of the queer-empowered Laser Life sci-fi reading series, where he met his co-conspirators in Metropolarity, a sci-fi/speculative arts collective that uses the genre’s tropes for activism and transformative, visionary art. It’s Alex’s flash fiction collection, “Gang Stalk Oprah“, with its lines hashed like an SAT-word injected SEPTA bus graffiti, and self-published sci-fi zine “Ark Dust” that will kidnap you, convert you, shoot you in the leg and then set you free.

Lamont B. Steptoe (Apiary 4) was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry while also serving as editor for two books by the late South African poet, Dennis Brutus. Steptoe is the winner of an American Book Award and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He’s the founder and publisher of Whirlwind Press. His latest book of poetry, Beyond the White Stone Lions, was published by Radical Paper Press in the summer of 2017.

“There are places we dream, and places, often mass grave sits, that dream through us- if, like Lamont Steptoe, we are open to the restless spirits who abide there, denied voice in their time, and wishing now to catch history’s ear. “Turn up the silence loud,” he says, and the whispering dead are heard, as lost ancestors “call this place out of its name,” and Philly’s Washington Square Park becomes Congo Square, a restitution and a requiem.” Eleanor Wilner

Hosted by Warren C. Longmire and Alex Smith