Moonstone Arts Center’s Poetry Reading

Wednesday May 10, 2023 – 7pm

Live at Fergie’s Pub – 1214 Sansom Street and on zoom – Registration Link

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAqduygpjMuHd0HPcfGrZY8yNfOp-0L4ixR

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of the full length collections Her Whole Bright Life (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize); Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart; and Beautiful & Full of Monsters. She loves nail polish, tattoos and a soy latte each morning. Find her online at www.courtneyleblanc.com Her Whole Bright Life is a collection of poems that weave together the trauma and exhaustion of a life lived with disordered eating and the loss and grief of the death of the poet’s father. Love and hunger intertwine and become inseparable as the poet grapples to find, and listen, to both. With a distinct and feminist voice, this collection delves into a life now lived without a beloved parent, while trying to survive a pandemic, and battling demons that have lived inside her for most of her life. With both fierceness and tenderness, we see a woman trying to find her place within her own body and within an ever-changing world. This collection of poems is both an elegy and an anthem – praising both those who’ve been lost and those who remain.

Lauren Ray is a Junior Creative writing major with an Art history minor at the University of the arts. She writes poetry and stories from the lens of the black woman experience. She is excited to share her work to an audience for the first time in a couple of years.

Ruth Rouff is a freelance educational writer living in Collingswood, NJ. Her poetry and prose have been published in various literary journals, including Parhelion, New World Writing, the International Quarterly, Philadelphia Poets, and Philadelphia Stories. In 2016, Bedazzled Ink published her collection of poetry and prose entitled Pagan Heaven. Her novel Lone Star, which is based on the life of famed athlete, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, was published by Bedazzled Ink in 2022 and is available on Amazon.com, BN.com, and BedazzledInk.com.

Larry Robin Host, Open Reading Follows