Moonstone Arts Center

Virtual Poetry Reading: Moonstone Chapbook Contest Winners 2020 to 2015
2021-10-17 14:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
Virtual Poetry Reading
Moonstone Chapbook Contest Winners 2020 to 2015
Hosted by J. C. Todd, our 2021 judge

Sunday October 17, 2021 – 2pm – Virtual

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84532069956?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 845 3206 9956 Passcode: [REDACTED]

Kyle Laws won in 2020 for The Sea Is Woman, author of Uncorseted, Ride the Pink Horse and Faces of Fishing Creek, she has 8 nominations for a Pushcart Prize. she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance.

Faith Paulsen was a runner up in 2020 for We Marry, We Bury, We Sing or We Weep. Her work has appeared in venues including Ghost City Press, Book of Matches, Panoply, Thimble, Evansville Review, and Mantis.

Kenneth Pobo won the 2019 contest for Book of Micah. He is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet, Uneven Steven, and Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose.

Emma Wynn was runner up in 2019 for Help Me to Fall. Her poetry has appeared in Sky Island, West Trade Review, The Raw Art Review, and Delmavra Review. She was a finalist for the Subvinean magazine 2021 poetry award.

Mbarek Styfi shared first prize in 2018 for The Trace of a Smile. Poet and translator, teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, his work has appeared in CELAAN Review, World Literature Today, Banipal, and many other journals.

Lisa Grunberger shared first prize in 2018 for i am dirty. She is also the author of Yiddish Yoga, Born Knowing, and her play, Almost Pregnant. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Hanging Loose Press, Crab Orchard Review.

Bevil Townsend was a runner-up in 2018 with One Hell of a Woman. She is a poet, feminist, and political junkie—sometimes in reverse order. She currently lives in Washington, DC and teaches storytelling to campaign activists.

George McDermott won the 2017 contest for Pictures, Some of Them Moving. He is a Philadelphia poet, who has been an English teacher, a speechwriter, and a screenwriter (those are not mutually exclusive, not even especially different).

Vernita Hall won the 2016 contest for Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians. She is the author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color.

Joe Roarty won our first chapbook contest in 2015 for Moritat, German for “street ballad”. Poetry of high-octane energy, passionate intelligence, supercharged, insistent blues, jazz and heightened speech rhythms.

All books are available at our Online Store.

There’s still time for you to join this list of winners! Our annual chapbook contest is open for submissions until November 5th, 2021.
Submit to the 2021 Moonstone Poetry Chapbook Contest: deadline 11/5/2021

Live Poetry Reading: Music and Poetry
2021-10-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Moonstone Live Poetry Reading
Music and Poetry

Wednesday October 20, 2021 – 7pm
Live at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street
on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 – Passcode: [REDACTED]

Lindsay Hargrave is a poet with recent publications in giallo, Button Eye Review, Maudlin House, Wrongdoing, Rust + Moth and more. They perform in the Philly area with improvised music collective Oarsman and indie pop band Mitamu and have a weekly tarot poetry column in the Philly Plain Dealer. Twitter: @notporkroll.

Elliott Levin is a Philadelphia jazz legend plays the saxophone and the flute and he’s also an abstract poet and often combines poetry and music during his performances. He has has toured and recorded with Cecil Taylor and The Arkestra’s Tyrone Hill and Marshal Allen, to name a few. He has a quite active career as a published poet and likes to combine the two aesthetics in his performances, much to the delight of the growing live poetry audience and to the chagrin of hipsters who insist jazz poetry is a form of torture, worse than cold showers. There is nothing watered-down or weak about his performances, no attempt to make the music a bit more accessible, tender-hearted or just plain wimpy. He also doesn’t seem to play music as if it was connected to some kind of career strategy, other than to just play all the time.

Joe Roarty was born in 1953 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has lived in Pittsburgh, Pa., Cleveland, Ohio, Boston, Mass., and Chicago, IL. and Philadelphia. He won the Moonstone Chapbook Contest in 2015 for Moritat (German for “street ballad”), poetry of high octane energy, passionate intelligence, supercharged, insistent blues, jazz and heightened speech rhythms, whose original language mixes dictions with masterful ease–at home on the street and in the stratosphere, a colloquial invention that uses texting’s phonetic spelling, omitting vowels in a way that drives the lines, while his images mix references in our polyglot way: “I hav hrd/ americn wrds”.

Virtual Poetry Reading: Poets Speak Back to Hunger
2021-10-23 14:00 - 16:00
Virtual Poetry Reading: Poets Speak Back to Hunger
Featuring readers from an e-Collection of Poems from Around the World

Saturday October 23, 2021 – 2pm EST
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84532069956?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 845 3206 9956, Passcode: [REDACTED]

Join us as we mark the publication of a ground-breaking collection of poems that Speak Back to Hunger. Several poets from near and far will read their work from the collection. And notable anti-hunger advocates will speak about the role that poetry can and should play in fighting hunger. We’ll also have time for questions and discussion.
Hunger needs an audience. This anthology is giving it one. A poet’s job is to speak the
truth: Teri Cross Davis says, “Shoo away the vulture, whose crime is hers too, hunger…”;
Henry Crawford says, “On those nights I made an apple out of sand / and watched it blow
away.”This truthful book speaks about “being gripped by hunger like a fist in his belly”;
Listen hard to the hungry people. Let the poets speak.
– Mary Ann Larkin, Poet, Maryland, USA
Poetry X Hunger thanks the following supporters and partners: The Maryland State Arts Council, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Liaison Office for North America, the Capital Area Food Bank, AaronR, Rebecca Roach and Diane Wilbon Parks, and Drs. Susan Schram and Tatiana LeGrand.

Host Hiram Larew
Followed by Q&A and Discussion

Virtual Poetry Reading: Gregory Djanikian and Daniel Simpson
2021-10-26 19:00 - 21:00
Virtual Poetry Reading: Gregory Djanikian and Daniel Simpson

Tuesday October 26, 2021 – 7pm
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 – Passcode: [REDACTED]

Gregory Djanikian is the author of seven collections of poetry, The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, So I Will Till the Ground, Dear Gravity, and most recently, Sojourners of the In-Between (February, 2020), all appearing from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His poems have appeared in such places as The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, crazyhorse, The Florida Review, The Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Poem in Your Pocket (The Academy of American Poets), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House), among others. He was for many years Director of the Creative Writing Program at Penn until his retirement in 2015. He lives outside of Philadelphia.

In 2017, Daniel Simpson and his wife, Ona Gritz, collaborated on two books, as co-authors of Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems and as co-editors of More Challenges for the Delusional, an anthology of prose, poetry, and writing prompts. School for the Blind, his first collection of poems, came out in 2014. His work has been anthologized in Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times, and Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, and has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, and many other journals. “Let’s Walk Together,” a composition for bass soloist and choir, based on a text he wrote, received its premiere performance by Voces8 in London last December. Voces8 and four other choirs also performed “A Song Everyone Can Sing, for which he served as lyricist in March, 2019. The recipient of a Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he tends a blog, Inside the Invisible, which can be found at insidetheinvisible.wordpress.com.

Alina Macneal & Jennifer Hook, Hosts – Open Reading Follows

Live Poetry Reading: Michele Belluomini, Ronald Carter, and Charlie O'Hay
2021-10-27 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Live Poetry Reading: Michele Belluomini, Ronald Carter, and Charlie O’Hay

Wednesday October 27, 2021 – 7pm
Live at Fergie’s Pub
And on Zoom
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 Passcode: [REDACTED]

Michele Belluomini’s poetry has been published in American Poetry, Philadelphia Poets, Beltway, The Mad Poets Review and Apiary. Her poems have also appeared in various Poetry Ink (Philadelphia) anthologies and the anthology COMMONWEALTH: Poets on Pennsylvania. The chapbook Crazy Mary and Others was a winner in the Plan B Press chapbook competition. Her most recent volume of poetry is Signposts for Sleepwalkers, also published by Plan B Press (Alexandria, VA). She works as an Adjunct Library Faculty member at Community College of Philadelphia

Ronald Carter is a native of Philadelphia. He started wring poetry at an early age of twelve. His love of poetry was influenced by the writings of Edgard Allen Poe, Niki Giovani, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Alex Hailey. Since 1995 to the present Ronald has participated in many poetry, historical reenactment, and storytelling events with such organizations as Mad poets Societ5y, La unique Book Store and Cultural Center’s Poets Den, Poets and Prophets, Philadelphia Poetry and Literary Forum, ,Moonstone Arts Center, Pen and Pencil Club, Historic Philadelphia, Keepers of the Culture, National Association of Black Storytellers, Patchwork Storytelling Guild, October Gallery AAMP. Rob is also published in the Mad Poets’ and Philadelphia Poetry and Literary forum’s

Charlie O’Hay is author of Far from Luck and Smoking In Elevators. Charlie’s poems have appeared in over 100 journals, including Mudfish, West Branch, Painted Bride Quarterly, Cortland Review, Gargoyle and The New York Quarterly. He is the recipient of a 1995 Fellowship in Poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Since 2010, Charlie’s ongoing photo series “Everyone Has a Name” has shared images and stories of the homeless in Center City Philadelphia to promote understanding, dignity, and an end to homelessness in America.

Followed by an open reading

Virtual Poetry Reading: David R. Slavitt and Julie Swarstad Johnson
2021-10-31 14:00 - 16:00
Virtual Poetry Reading: David R. Slavitt and Julie Swarstad Johnson

Sunday October 31, 2021 – 2pm EST
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84532069956?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 845 3206 9956, Passcode: [REDACTED]

David R. Slavitt’s new book is Opus Posthumous and Other Poems ($19.95, LSU Press, 978-0807175668). He is a poet, novelist, critic, and author of more than 130 works of literature, in styles ranging from dramatic translations to pulp fiction. Despite the diversity of his literary endeavors, however, poetry remains his primary occupation. He has said, “There is almost always a longish project to which I can repair for entertainment and occupation. But I will put that aside, whatever it is, if a poem presents itself to me.” Like the rest of his work, Slavitt’s poetry is full of wit, though it balances satire with a sense of gravity. His new book, Slavitt traverses Africa, India, Israel, and the America in which he finds himself, complete with visits to zoos, casinos, baseball fields, and cemeteries, as he searches for clues from which he might learn at least a little. He translates verse from Yiddish and Provençal and offers commentaries on received wisdom, everyday events, and the vagaries of existence. Slavitt’s awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for translation, an award for literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Rockefeller Foundation artist’s residency. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“The power of narrative to transform the events it recounts is among the most rewarding mysteries by which we can be absorbed. David Slavitt is among the most accomplished living practitioners of that art, in both prose and verse; his poems give us a pleasurable, beautiful way of meditating on a bad time. We can’t ask much more of literature, and usually we get far less.”—Henry Taylor in Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets
“[Slavitt’s] range in forms, tones of voice, and subject matter is wide and various. He shows that he can handle all kinds of tough, tricky forms, and that he likes forms. He is perfectly at home in many rhythms, formal and syncopated. The language is brilliant, the range almost complete (from Ronald Firbank to Lenny Bruce and Dave Gardner). He can be witty or can crack wise as the occasion demands. Above all, he can think in verse, thus inviting the reader to use his intelligence, too.”—George Garrett in The Hollins Critic

Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of Pennsylvania Furnace (2019), editor’s choice selection for the Unicorn Press first book series, and co-editor of the anthology Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (University of Arizona Press, 2020). She has served as Artist in Residence at Gettysburg National Military Park, which led to the chapbook Orchard Light (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). She lives in Tucson and works at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
“In poems quietly fierce, meticulously observed, faithfully rendered, musically tempered; in the uncanny ability to evoke both the presence of the past, its once molten iron, and its abandonment by time, Julie Swarstad Johnson raises a ‘host of silent voices praising every shadow.’ In these graceful poems, Claudia Emerson has found an heir. Pennsylvania Furnace is fired by the haunting beauty and revelation of its resonant images, ‘finding use / not in the thing itself, but in what / it opened…’” —Eleanor Wilner, Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017

Live Poetry Reading - Sean Lynch, Warren Longmire, Rocky Wilson
2021-11-03 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Nick Virgilio Haiku Association Anthology Reading
Featuring Sean Lynch, Warren Longmire and Rocky Wilson
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 Passcode: [REDACTED]

Celebrate the release of the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association’s Haiku in Action anthology ($20.00, A Year in Poems: Haiku in Action Volume 2, 2020)! Featuring haiku from around the world, the new anthology continues the tradition of haiku in the modern age.

Sean Lynch, he/him, is a poet and editor who lives in South Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in journal, s including Hobart, Meow Meow Pow Pow, and Drunk Monkeys. He’s on the editorial board of Moonstone Arts Center and serves as the Program Director of the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association. His Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor of choice is Citalopram.

Warren Longmire is the co-founder of the Excelano Project Spoken Word Collective and the former Director of Poetry Events for Blue Stoop. He’s been published in journals including American Poetry Review, Eleven Eleven, Graviton and The Painted Bride Quarterly. He is featured in the Best American Poetry 2021 anthology and will release his first full collection with Radiator Press this fall. You can find his writings, musings and selfies on Instagram @alongmirewriter.

Rocky Wilson is a poet, performance artist and substitute teacher who lives along the Delaware River in Camden, NJ with his little puppet friend bongo.
“Rocky Wilson is not just the muse of Camden, New Jersey, the poorest city in these rich, un-united states, he is its soul. Camden is where he finds redemption for a lifetime of loss, “What saves our lives” HE WRITES, “a 6th grade girl, a little cloth monkey, a dull knife, an angel’s wings brushing through the ghetto night.” There’s no doubt in my mind, that if Walt Whitman were alive, he would be rocky Wilson’s biggest fan.” — Peter E. Murphy, Stockton College

Sean Lynch, Host

Virtual Poetry Reading: Charles Carr, Cathleen Cohen, Faith Paulsen
2021-11-04 19:00 - 20:00
Virtual Poetry Reading with Charles Carr, Cathleen Cohen and Faith Paulsen

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 – Passcode: [REDACTED]

Charles Carr is author of paradise, pennsylvania, and Haitian Mudpies & Other Poems (Moonstone Arts 2012). A Philadelphian, he was educated at LaSalle and Bryn Mawr College and worked in social and community development services for 45 years. Charles has been active in raising funds for various missions and organizations serving the poorest of the poor In Haiti. In 2007, Charles was The Mad Poets Review First Prize Winner for his poem “Waiting To Come North.” For five years Charles was the host of the Moonstone Poetry series at Fergie’s Pub. Since 2016 he has been the host of Philly Loves Poetry a monthly broadcast on Philly Cam. He has read poems in the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin Ireland as part of international 100,000 Poets For Peace.

Cathleen Cohen, author of Camera Obscura (Moonstone Press, 2017) and Etching the Ghost (forthcoming). She was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia. Her poems appear in Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review, Rogue Agent, She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy. Her artwork is on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery.

Faith Paulsen is author of A Color Called Harvest, We Marry, We Bury, We Sing or We Weep (runner-up in Moonstone’s 2020 chapbook contest), and forthcoming, Cyanometer. Her poetry and prose have appeared in many venues including One Art, Ghost City Press, Seaborne, Book of Matches, Thimble Literary Magazine, Evansville Review, Mantis, Psaltery and Lyre, and Terra Preta. Her work has also been anthologized in collections such as 50/50: Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50 (QuillsEdge). She has been nominated for a Pushcart. For more information, please check her website at https://www.faithpaulsenpoet.com/.

Virtual Poetry Reading: Cynthia Dewi Oka with Charles S. Carr
2021-11-09 18:30 - 19:30
Moonstone Poetry @ PhillyCAM
Philly Loves Poetry Interview and Reading Series, featuring Cynthia Dewi Oka

Watch the live broadcast: Comcast Cable 66/966HD/967 | Verizon FIOS 29/30 in Philadelphia | PhillyCAM TV: https://phillycam.org/watch

Cynthia Dewi Oka was born in Bali, Indonesia. Since 2012, she has been based in the Greater Philadelphia Area, Lenni Lenape Land, with her son and partner. She is the author of Fire Is Not a Country ($17.00, 9780810144217, Northwestern University Press), Salvage and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water and serves as a Poetry Editor at Kweli Journal. A 2021-2022 Poet in Residence at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, MA, she has been awarded the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award, the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry. Cynthia has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and literary/arts organizations including Murphy Writing of Stockton University, The Blue Stoop, and Asian Arts Initiative, with whom she partnered in the aftermath of the 2016 election to offer Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets based in Philadelphia. She has served as a visiting Distinguished Writer at Widener University, and conducted workshops and readings at Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, The New School, New York University, Swarthmore College, and Williams College, among others.
In her third collection, Cynthia dives into the implications of being parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism. With a voice bound and wrestled apart by multiple histories, Fire Is Not a Country claims the spaces between here and there, then and now, us and not us. As she builds a lyric portrait of her own family, Oka interrogates how migration, economic exploitation, patriarchal violence, and a legacy of political repression shape the beauties and limitations of familial love and obligation. Woven throughout are speculative experiments that intervene in the popular apocalyptic narratives of our time with the wit of an unassimilable other.

Charles S. Carr, host

Live Poetry Reading: Erica Abbott, Theodosia Mayfield, and Brooke Palma
2021-11-10 19:00 - 20:00
Live Poetry Reading: Erica Abbott, Theodosia Mayfield, Brooke Palma, hosted by Sean Hanrahan
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 – Passcode: [REDACTED]
Erica Abbott (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based poet and writer whose work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Midway Journal, Serotonin, The Broadkill Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She is the author of Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship (Toho, 2020) and volunteers for Button Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, and Mad Poets Society.

Theodosia Mayfield is a nonbinary performer, writer, and artist specializing in surreal moments of whimsy and existential hope. They specialize in immersive experiences that ask audience members to join in the story wherever it may go, especially if it goes off the rails. In their free time, Theodosia likes to cuddle the sentient sack of potatoes the shelter insisted was a dog.

Brooke Palma grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Many of her poems focus on the connections between culture and identity and finding beauty in the everyday. Her work has been published in The Mad Poets’ Review, Moonstone Arts, Toho Journal, and E-Verse Radio (online). Her chapbook, Conversations Unfinished, was published by The Moonstone Press in August 2019. She hosts the Livin’ on Luck Poetry Series at Barnaby’s West Chester and serves as Vice President/Treasurer for the Mad Poets Society.

Sean Hanrahan, Host
Open Reading Follows

Virtual Poetry Reading: The Disasters of War: An Anthology for Veterans Day
2021-11-14 14:00 - 16:00
Virtual Poetry Reading from The Disasters of War: An Anthology for Veterans Day

Event Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84532069956?pwd=[REDACTED]

The Disasters of War: An Anthology for Veterans Day
So much of what is presented on Veterans Day is the pomp and circumstance of the military, the parades and speeches extolling patriotism and bravery. All governments claim the high ground and send their young people to battle and then when some of them return broken, they are ignored. This is not new, nor is it one country or ideology.
The disaster of war is what it does to human beings.
Some veterans suffer combat-related injuries, including mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, traumatic brain injury. Other issues include extreme fatigue, neurological issues, insomnia, migraines, joint pain, persistent coughing, gastrointestinal issues such as diarrhea and constipation, skin problems, dizziness, respiratory disorders, and memory problems. The list goes on. These issues can lead to homelessness as well as drug or alcohol addiction.
We asked Veterans, their families, and the public to send us poems for Veterans Day reflecting on this, which will be read on November 14th. Please join us as the contributors read their work.

Virtual Book Reading: Samuel R. Delany
2021-11-16 19:00 - 20:00
Virtual Book Reading with Samuel R. Delany

Starting with this event, Moonstone is requiring registration for Zoom readings. To access the reading, you must register in advance.
Register for the reading here.

Samuel R. Delany’s newest book is Of Solids and Surds: Notes for Noël Sturgeon, Marilyn Hacker, Josh Lukin, Mia Wolff, Bill Stribling, and Bob White.

His work includes fiction (especially science fiction), memoir, criticism and essays on science fiction, literature, sexuality, and society. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo Awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002. From January 1975 until his retirement in May 2015, he was a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and/or Creative Writing at SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Albany, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Temple University. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 30th SFWA Grand Master in 2013, and in 2016, he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Delany received the 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Delany’s prismatic output is among the most significant, immense and innovative in American letters.”—Jordy Rosenberg, New York Times
“A fascinating glimpse into the creative life of novelist and critic Delany …. He dispenses wisdom about craft—including the demanding revision process his dyslexia requires—but most moving are the moments when he sheds light on connections he has made with other readers and writers …. Delany’s fans are in for a treat.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Register for our reading with Delany

Buy an Autographed Copy!

Live Poetry Reading: Sydney Hunt Coffin, Naa Koikoi Aziza Zenzile Kebe, Alina Macneal
2021-11-17 19:00 - 20:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Live Poetry Reading with Sydney Hunt Coffin, Naa Koikoi Aziza Zenzile, and Alina Macneal
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 – Passcode: [REDACTED]

Sydney Hunt Coffin has been with the Philadelphia Writing Project since 2011, when he was working as an English teacher at University City High School. He has taught English, Poetry, and Art for 20 years in Philadelphia, spending summers working and studying at Yale University and has served on the Teacher Advisory Council of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As a poet he has been published in Mad House Press, Apiary magazine, and Yale University Press, and is currently an MFA student at New York University in Paris.

Naa Koikoi Aziza Zenzile Kebe (After the Queen, Precious, One Who Controls Her Destiny) is a Multimedia Artist, Activist, Griot, Public Servant, and Citizen of the World who utilizes her artform to uplift her culture, promote Black Womanhood in a positive light, and cultivate a consciousness receptive to social and political change. Her poetry has also been included in Hair Stories, Now Anthology, Poetry Ink, Howard University’s Amistad Literary Journal, Poetry Ink Tenth Anniversary, The Apiary, Versadelphia, E Pluribus Unum: An Anthology of Diverse Voices, For Women: In Tribute to Nina Simone, and Philly Jawns, For Women Revisited as well as, other publications worldwide

Alina Macneal is a Philadelphia-based educator/writer/poet/translator/architect and co-host of the Fourth Wednesday Moonstone poetry series at Fergie’s. Her poems have appeared in Apiary, Poems for the Writing, The World to Come, and Poetry 24. In 2015 she was a finalist for the Raynes poetry prize. She has been a member of the faculty at Drexel University for over 20 years. Since the last presidential election Alina has been translating the 1930’s political poems of the Polish poet, Julian Tuwim. As Mark Twain said, History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Virtual Poetry Reading: Readings from New Voices: Fall 2021
2021-11-20 14:00 - 15:00
Virtual Poetry Reading of Readings of New Voices: Fall 2021

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84532069956?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 845 3206 9956, Passcode: [REDACTED]
Help us celebrate the young voices of poetry with our Fall 2021 New Voices anthology release!
New Voices: Philadelphia’s Emerging Poets is a program designed for emerging poets under the age of 25. It aims to create a platform for younger poets by welcoming them into the larger Philadelphia poetry community and giving them the opportunity to share their work with a wider audience.
We tend to narrow our audience and present to others in our schools or poetry groups. Moonstone’s goal is to expand your audience, get you published, and introduce you to others who share your interest in poetry but live in different communities. Each month we present three poets from different communities followed by an open reading.
Click here to see our previous volumes of New Voices.

Live Poetry Reading: R.G. Evans, Michael Storm Miller, and Rocky Wilson
2021-11-24 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Live Poetry Reading with R.G. Evans, Michael Storm Miller, and Rocky Wilson

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 – Passcode: [REDACTED]

R.G. Evans’s books include Overtipping the Ferryman (Aldrich Press Poetry Prize), The Holy Both, and Imagine Sisyphus Happy. His poems and prose have appeared in RATTLE, Philadelphia Stories, and Weird Tales among other publications. Evans’s first album of original songs, Sweet Old Life, is available on most streaming platforms, and he is currently recording a follow up album.

Michael Storm Miller is a poet/ spoken word artist from Chester who served in the military for 15 and uses spoken word as a median to bridge the gap in understanding between veterans and civilians so that together we all can find healing.

Rocky Wilson is a poet, performance artist and substitute teacher who lives along the Delaware River in Camden, NJ with his little puppet friend bongo.
“Rocky Wilson is not just the muse of Camden, New Jersey, the poorest city in these rich, un-united states, he is its soul. Camden is where he finds redemption for a lifetime of loss, “What saves our lives” HE WRITES, “a 6th grade girl, a little cloth monkey, a dull knife, an angel’s wings brushing through the ghetto night.” There’s no doubt in my mind, that if Walt Whitman were alive, he would be rocky Wilson’s biggest fan.” -Peter E. Murphy, Stockton College

Open Reading Follows

Book Release Party: John Wall Barger's "Resurrection Fail" with Savannah Cooper-Ramsey, Ernest Hilbert, Warren C Longmire, Glorious Piner, Luke Stromberg
2021-12-01 19:00 - 20:00
Book Release Party for John Wall Barger’s “Resurrection Fail”
Featuring readings from Savannah Cooper-Ramsey, Ernest Hilbert, Warren C Longmire, Glorious Piner, Luke Stromberg, hosted by Fayyaz Vellani
1214 Sansom Street and on zoom
Register for the Zoom link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86880897372?pwd=[REDACTED]

John Wall Barger is the author of Pain-proof Men; Hummingbird; The Book of Festus; The Mean Game and Resurrection Fail. He is a contract editor for Frontenac House, and teaches at UARTS.

Savannah Cooper-Ramsey is the author of the artist book Not Fit for Print, winner of BOMB Magazine’s 2018 Biennial Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2018 Sandy Crimmins National Poetry Award.

Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—and Last One Out, he works as a rare book dealer and book critic for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

Warren C Longmire is a writer, software engineer and educator from the bad part of North Philadelphia. His writing has been published in American Poetry Review, Eleven Eleven, The Painted Bride Quarterly and in the upcoming Best American Poetry Anthology of 2021.

Glorious Piner teaches Poetry at the University of Maryland and at the University of the Arts, published in Queerbook, The American Poetry Review, The Florida Review, Conduit Magazine, and more.

Luke Stromberg’s poetry and criticism have appeared in Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Golidad Review, Think Journal, and others, he is Associate Poetry Editor of E-Verse Radio.

HOST: Fayyaz Vellani is a British-Canadian writer who has lived in London, New York, and Philadelphia, where he teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His first novel Tea with Ms. Tanzania will be published by Africa World Press in 2022.

Virtual Poetry Reading: David R. Slavitt
2021-12-05 14:00 - 15:00
Registration Required, register at:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAodOuoqDIjH9L0yqjhYo_jLZzXejq83PCT
Virtual poetry reading with David R. Slavitt.

David R. Slavitt’s new book is Opus Posthumous and Other Poems (19.95, LSU Press 978-0807175668). He is a poet, novelist, critic, and author of more than
130 works of literature, in styles ranging from dramatic translations to pulp fiction. His new book, Opus Posthumous and Other Poems, Slavitt traverses Africa, India, Israel, and the America in which he finds himself, complete with visits to zoos, casinos, baseball fields, and cemeteries, as he searches for clues from which he might learn at least a little. He translates verse from Yiddish and Provençal and offers commentaries on received wisdom, everyday events, and the vagaries of existence. Slavitt’s awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for translation, an award for literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Rockefeller Foundation artist’s
residency. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“The power of narrative to transform the events it recounts is among the most rewarding mysteries by which we can be absorbed. David Slavitt is among the most accomplished living practitioners of that art, in both prose and verse; his poems give us a pleasurable, beautiful way of m
editating on a bad time. We can’t ask much more of literature, and usually we get far less.” ― Henry Taylor in “Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets”
“[Slavitt’s] range in forms, tones of voice, and subject matter is wide and various. He shows that he can handle all kinds of tough, tricky forms, and that he likes forms. He is perfectly at home in many rhythms, formal and syncopated. The language is brilliant, the range almost complete (from Ronald Firbank to Lenny Bruce and Dave Gardner). He can be witty or can crack wise as the occasion demands. Above all, he can think in verse, thus inviting the reader to use his intelligence, too.” ― George Garrett in “The Hollins Critic”

PhillyCAM Interview and Reading Series: Daniel Simpson with Charles S. Carr
2021-12-07 18:30 - 19:30
PhillyCAM and Moonstone present Daniel Simpson in conversation with Charles S. Carr
Watch the live broadcast:
Comcast Cable 66/966HD/967 | Verizon FIOS 29/30 in Philadelphia | PhillyCAM TV: https://phillycam.org/watch

In 2017, Daniel Simpson and his wife, Ona Gritz, collaborated on two books, as co-authors of Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems and as co-editors of More Challenges for the Delusional, an anthology of prose, poetry, and writing prompts. School for the Blind, his first collection of poems, came out in 2014. His work has been anthologized in Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times, and Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, and has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, and many other journals. “Let’s Walk Together,” a composition for bass soloist and choir, based on a text he wrote, received its premiere performance by Voces8 in London last December. Voces8 and four other choirs also performed “A Song Everyone Can Sing, for which he served as lyricist in March, 2019. The recipient of a Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he tends a blog, Inside the Invisible, which can be found at insidetheinvisible.wordpress.com.

Live Poetry Reading: Eduardo C. Corral, Cameron MacKenzie, Spencer Short, with John Wall Barger
2021-12-08 19:00 - 20:00
Live Poetry Reading with Eduardo C. Corral, Cameron MacKenzie, and Spencer Short, hosted by John Wall Barger
Live at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street and on zoom
Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIlf-mgpzwpHdZZB3CAIOVCXQ-8utbL0yWr

Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize
and Guillotine. Praised for his seamless blending of English and Spanish, tender treatment of history, and careful exploration of sexuality, Corral has received numerous honors and awards, including the Discovery/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A CantoMundo Fellow, he has held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing at Colgate University and was the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. In 2016 he won the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Corral teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

Cameron MacKenzie was born in Virginia and has worked as a dry cleaner, house painter, contractor, editor, and teacher, residing in Santa Barbara, London, Tokyo, Philadelphia, San Francisco and now Virginia once again, where he lives with his wife and two children. Cameron MacKenzie’s work has appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Salmagundi, The Rumpus, and J Journal, among other places. His novel, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career and monograph Badiou and American Modernist Poetics were both published in 2018. He teaches English at Ferrum College and writes for The Roanoke Review.

Spencer Short‘s collection of poetry, Tremolo, was a winner of the 2000 National Poetry Series, selected by Billy Collins. Emily Nussbaum, reviewing Tremolo for The New York Times, noted “”a prickly stir of humor, philosophy and romantic giddiness,” and that “reading this book is something like walking into a kitchen at a party and coming upon a wild charmer you’d never met, mid-gesticulation — a terrific storyteller, but also one eager to switch gears mid-sentence, mid-phrase, mid-thought.” Cal Bedient, reviewing Tremolo in the Boston Review, found “a clawing power of invention.” In 2003, Short was included in the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets festival honoring the “most interesting recent first book poets.” His poems have been included in several anthologies.

Open Reading Follows

Virtual Poetry Reading: Daniel Biegelson, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Lisa Grunberger, Alicia Jo Rabins
2021-12-09 19:00 - 20:00
Virtual Poetry Reading with Daniel Biegelson, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Lisa Grunberger, Alicia Jo Rabins
Split at the Root: Jewish Writers Wrestle with Parenthood, Politics, and Memory

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84308329737?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 843 0832 9737 – Passcode: [REDACTED]

Daniel Biegelson is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). He serves as the Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University, where he also works as an editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Mid-American Review, New Orleans Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, & RHINO Poetry, among other places He holds an MFA from the University of Montana and an MA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He lives near Kansas City with his wife and children.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is the author of The Many Names for Mother, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, Don’t Touch the Bones and 40 WEEKS. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation. She is Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine and occasionally writes Other women don’t tell you, a blog about motherhood. Julia came to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1993, from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and grew up in the DC metro area suburb of Rockville, Maryland. Her research focuses on contemporary poetry about the Holocaust, with a special focus on atrocity in former Soviet territories.

Pushcart nominee, Temple University Professor, Lisa Grunberger is a first-generation American writer. Her poetry books I am dirty and Born Knowing are lyrical reflections on life as a Jewish woman, a mother, and a daughter of Shoah survivors. Her book, Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss and the Lotus Position is currently being adapted as a musical. Her work is widely published and translatred from The New York Times to the Crab Orchard Review. Almost Pregnant, her play about infertility and assisted reproductive technologies, is published by Smith Scripts. Alexa Talks to Rebecca won the Audience Choice Award at the Squeaky Bicyle Theatre and will soon be a short film.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, composer, performer and Torah teacher, author of Divinity School (2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode(a finalist for the Jewish Book Award.) She creates multi-genre works of experimental beauty which explore the intersection of ancient wisdom texts with everyday life, is the creator of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women and A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff (now an award-winning independent feature film). She is a coffee drinker, plant lover, DIY bar/bat/b’nai mitzvah tutor, and ritualist based in Portland, Oregon.

Virtual Poetry Reading: Christian Andres Alfaro De La Rosa, Paul Buchanan, Reuben Gelley Newman, Nicole Liu, Yi Wei, with Nathalie Anderson
2021-12-12 14:00 - 15:00
Virtual Poetry Reading: Poets in Their Youth
Featuring Christian Andres Alfaro De La Rosa, Paul Buchanan, Reuben Gelley Newman, Nicole Liu, and Yi Wei, hosted by Nathalie Anderson

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84532069956?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 845 3206 9956, Passcode: [REDACTED]

Christian Andres Alfaro De La Rosa (he/him) is a first generation, Mexican/Chicano writer based out of his hometown of Chicago, Illinois. He writes about the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, class, inter racial solidarity, poems that touch on his hometown of Chicago, his upbringing, childhood and coming of age within the city’s Southwest Side; he also incorporates other mediums art into his poetry as well (such as photography, visual art, music) that not only inspire, but fuel his creativity and his writing.

Paul Buchanan (he/they) is a queer, Afro-Caribbean writer with roots in Guyana and the American South. His primary interests lie in the intersections between Black identity formation, trauma, and the Black literary tradition. Currently, he is teaching 1st grade full time, working on
extending his research surrounding Black family trauma narratives into a full paper, and working on a collection of chapbooks. He has a B.A in Black Studies and English from Swarthmore College and is a recipient of both the John Russel Hayes Poetry prize and the Mellon Mays Fellowship.

Reuben Gelley Newman (he/him) is a writer and musician from New York City. His work is available in diode, DIALOGIST, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. He was a Fall 2020 intern at Copper Canyon Press and works in the library at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. He tweets @joustingsnail.

Nicole Liu (she/her) was born in Hong Kong, raised in Shenzhen, and came of age in Boston. In her poems and essays, she is attracted to topics of miscommunication and the absurd details of her life. Nicole graduated magna cum laude from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in English and Chinese. She is currently applying to graduate school while working as a writer, writing instructor, and translator.

Yi Wei is a first-generation Chinese writer with a BA in Asian American Studies and English from Swarthmore College. She currently serves as the Assistant Flash Fiction Editor at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Yi has been awarded the Lois Morrell Poetry Prize and is the third-place winner for the 2021 Sappho Prize for Women Poets. Her work can be found in Palette Poetry, Lantern Review, and Crosswinds. She’s currently a Writer in the Public Schools fellow at NYU’s MFA in poetry.

Live Book Release: Open Source - Warren C. Longmire, with Sean Lynch
2021-12-15 19:00 - 20:00
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

POSTPONED: Serotonin Marathon Virtual Reading
2021-12-18 14:00 - 16:00
Serotonin Marathon Virtual Reading
POSTPONED until further notice

Serotonin is partnering with Moonstone Arts Center for a mental illness marathon poetry reading over Zoom.
Neurodivergent readers from around the world will share their work on how they live with their mental illnesses. Readers include Sean Lynch, Raye Hendrix, Thomas Nuhfer, Kika Man, Cleo, Lemmy Ya’akova, Jerica Taylor, Alexandra Weiss, James Roach, Erica Abbott, Lexi Locket, Lauren Theresa, Claire Taylor, Maddi Crease, plus an open mic! Serotonin seeks to be a safe haven for neurodivergent writers and readers. We publish poetry and short poetic prose on mental illness, neurodivergence, and suicide prevention.
Sean Lynch, Host

Live Poetry Reading: Lynn Levin, Jim Mancinelli, Elijah B. Pringle III
2021-12-22 19:00 - 20:00
Live Poetry Reading with Lynn Levin, Jim Mancinelli, and Elijah B. Pringle III

1214 Sansom Street and on zoom –
Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIlf-mgpzwpHdZZB3CAIOVCXQ-8utbL0yWr

Lynn Levin’s most recent poetry collection, The Minor Virtues is listed as one of Spring 2020’s best books by The Philadelphia Inquirer. Poet Ross Gay calls the book “a lovely honoring of the small, the minor sweetnesses that a life is made of.” Her previous collections include Miss Plastique, Fair Creatures of an Hour, and Imaginarium. She is the translator, from the Spanish, of Birds on the Kiswar Tree by Odi Gonzales and co-author of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, Artful Dodge, Rattle, on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and other places. She teaches at Drexel University. Her website is lynnlevinpoet.com

Jim Mancinelli is author of Primer, In Deep, and The Bartimeus Poems for which he also did the improvisational drawings. His writing is informed by gazing upwards, wandering the depths, and digging in the muddy present. His poems have appeared in The Connecticut River Review, Philadelphia Poets, The Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Sea Change, Mad Poets Review, Fox Chase Review, and Poetry Ink. He has been a featured reader in various Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware including Live from Kelly Writer’s House, was selected as a finalist in the 2011 Atlanta Queer Literary Festival, judged by Mark Doty and is the moderator and founder of the Moveable Beats Reading Series. Jim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at La Salle University in Philadelphia with research interests in the sociological aspects of stuttering.

Elijah B Pringle III is a Philadelphia based writer/director/actor/choreographer. He has published several chapbooks and his words have been published on every continent except for South American and Antarctica. He has lectured and lead workshops on poetry in AZ, CA,IL, MA, MD, MN, NY, PA, SC and DC. His opinions and insights have appeared in the NY Times, Newsweek and the Philadelphia Daily News. He has recently completed his first full length play entitled “Should Be.” His most recent publication is Lamda Lancer, a collection of LGBT inspired poetry.

Open Reading Follows

Moonstone Poetry @ PhillyCam: Siduri Beckman
2022-01-04 18:30 - 20:30
Moonstone Poetry @ PhillyCam: Siduri Beckman
Join us at Comcast Cable 66/966HD/967 or Verizon FIOS 29/30 in Philadelphia for an interview and reading by Siduri Beckman!
Siduri Beckman is a lifelong Philadelphian. She served as the inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia where she was mentored by Poet Laureate Sonia Sanchez. She was published most recently in MSU Press’s 2019 collection, Undocumented: Great Lakes Poet Laureates on Social Justice. Siduri is passionate about the intersection of poetry, public education, and civic engagement. Siduri graduated from Yale University in 2020.

Virtual Poetry Reading: Hannah McDonald, Dave Worrell, Sekai'afua Zankel
2022-01-05 19:00
Virtual Poetry Reading: Hannah McDonald, Dave Worrell, Sekai’afua Zankel
On zoom – Registration Required – Registration Link
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0uduqqqT4tGdxHPamACb5lmRvm5KxM3fY3

Hannah McDonald is a writer, poet, geek, and generally funny queer woman. You may have caught her onstage at The Bechdel Test Fest, the National Poetry Slam, or any number of literary events in the Philly area. The strangest place she’s ever performed her work was a sex toy shop in Vineland, NJ. Her past chapbooks are, sadly, out of print. Her writing has appeared in Apiary, The Legendary, and Dreamstreets. Hannah writes fan-fiction, if you’re into that sort of thing, and is currently dreaming of writing a novel. You might also find her singing karaoke, eating popsicles, baby-talking to her two guinea pigs, or having adventures with friends like you.

Dave Worrell is the author of We Who Were Bound and Close to Home featuring paintings by Catherine Kuzma. Dave’s poems have appeared in Slant, Canary, Heroin Chic, Shot Glass Journal, Referential Magazine, Wild River Review, and elsewhere. He has performed his music-backed poems at Chris’ Jazz Café in Philadelphia and The Cornelia Street Café in New York.
He began writing poetry toward the end of his 30-plus year law career, has taught writing at area community colleges and business law to undergraduates at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business.

Sekai’afua Zankel, actor, writer, and poet, She is the author of Behind These Eyes/Optical Poems, and a winner of the Leeway Foundation, Art and Change Grant for her Poetry Play, Miss Pearl’s Spirit: In the Mysteries of Mirrors. Her poems have been published In the CAP literary magazine, “Poetry Ink”, several Anthologies, and in “Apiary”, 7 Power Issue. Sekai lives in Philadelphia with her husband, musician Bobby Zankel.

Open Reading Follows

Virtual Poetry Reading: Hope
2022-01-09 14:00 - 16:00
Virtual Poetry Reading: Hope

What do you hope for – Send us a poem!
DEADLINE – December 31st, 2021
Registration Required – Registration Link
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvdO-rpjkoHN1QpCSC9zQU-VrVqTUCFuem

In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman created by the gods. … Nonetheless, Pandora
opened the jar (in modern accounts often mistranslated as “Pandora’s box“) releasing all the evils that
visit humanity like pain and suffering, leaving only hope (expectation) inside once she had closed it
again.
As a noun: Aspiration, desire, wish, expectation, ambition, aim, plan, dream, daydream, pipe dream,
longing, yearning, craving, hankering – As a verb: Expect, anticipate, look for, wait for, be hopeful of, pin
one’s hopes on, want, wish for, dream of, hope against hope for.

Virtual Poetry Reading: Jeffrey Ethan Lee, Mbarek Sryfi, Octavia McBride-Ahebee
2022-01-12 19:00 - 21:00
Virtual Poetry Reading: Jeffrey Ethan Lee, Mbarek Sryfi, Octavia McBride-Ahebee
ON ZOOM
Registration Required – Registration Link
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0uduqqqT4tGdxHPamACb5lmRvm5KxM3fY3

Jeffrey Ethan Lee‘s first poetry book, invisible sister, was a finalist for the
MMM Press Book Prize. His second book, identity papers, was a finalist for
the Colorado Book Award. His novel, The Autobiography of Somebody Else,
was published by White Pine Press. He won the Sow’s Ear Poetry Press Prize
and the Seven Kitchens Press prizes for poetry chapbooks, and he has
published other poetry chapbooks with Ashland Poetry Press and Moonstone
Press. Poems and prose have been published in APR, North American Review,
Xconnect, etc.

Mbarek Sryfi, poet and translator, teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
He is the author of The Trace of a Smile and City Poems, co-authored
Perspectives: Arabic Language and Culture in Film and co-translator of
several books. His work has been widely published in many journals and
anthologies including Al-Arabiyya, Banipal, CELAAN Review,
Metamorphoses, Middle Eastern Literatures, The Journal of North African
Studies, Translation Review, and World Literature Today.

Octavia McBride-Ahebee‘s work presents human relationships within the
context of global inequality. She is the author of Assuming Voices, Where My
Birthmark Dances and Praise Song for the Gravediggers. Her work has
appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Rigorous, For
Harriet, Raising Lilly Ledbetter; Women Poets Occupy the Workplace, Yellow
Medicine, Damazine; A Literary Journal of the Muslim World, Fingernails
Across The Chalkboard: Poetry And Prose on HIV/AIDS From the Black
Diaspora, Under Our Skin: Literature of Breast Cancer and others.

New Voices: Finn Holovacs, Nilah Swan, Evan Wang
2022-01-15 14:00 - 16:00
New Voices: Finn Holovacs, Nilah Swan, Evan Wang
Registration Required, Registration link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpcuGtpzIoG9dikX3bDiCslAgJT2w7eGZh
New Voices is a program designed for emerging poets under the age of 25. It aims to create a platform for young poets by welcoming them into the larger poetry community and giving them the opportunity to share their work with a wide audience.
Finn Holovacs is 20 year old from Sparta, New Jersey. He is currently a Communications major with a focus in Journalism at Drexel University. He is an avid writer and has been creating poetry since he was young. Finn enjoys water skiing, spending time with his Siberian Husky, Juneau, and reading/collecting comic books.

Nilah Swan is a freshman at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is studying Secondary English Education in hopes of being a high school English teacher. She loves dance, tennis, and poetry and is on the dance team at Temple.

Evan Wang is a poet, artist, and musician who was raised on and by the internet. He’s always found a love for words and discovered his niche for poetry at age 12. His work has appeared in Teen Ink, Youth Be Heard, Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, Bleeding Soul Poetry, among other publications. Evan attends Upper Merion High School and is a Topical Winner of JUST POETRY!!!’s National High School Poetry Contest and winner of Teen Ink’s weekly competition. He has performed at cultural events and readings around the Philadelphia area.

Moonstone Poetry Reading: Five New Chapbooks from Moonstone Press
2022-01-19 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Moonstone Poetry Reading: Five New Chapbooks from Moonstone Press
Live at Fergie’s Pub (1214 Sansom Street) and on Zoom – Registration Required – Registration Link
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0uduqqqT4tGdxHPamACb5lmRvm5KxM3fY3

Hal Freedman is the author of Poems of a Classical Musician ($10.00). His opinion is that the line between music and poetry is a thin one, if such a line exists at all. He feels that both music and poetry are the expressions of an inner melody; one that speaks of the human story. Poet and Editor, Rosemary Cappello.

Irving Courtley Jones, aka Karamo Muchuri Sulieman, is an African American poet and author of Sweet Mints ($10.00). He received Honorable Mention in the 1999 Mellon Poetry Contest, for a 100+ page poem entitled Black Roses. He has also published in numerous magazines; journals and anthologies.

Bohdan Pechenyak, author of 9/11 ($10.00) is a bilingual Ukrainian-American author of poetry, prose, and translations. Born in Lviv, Ukraine, lives in Philadelphia, PA, USA. The two decades circumscribed by the subtitle – 2001- 2021 – were defined by multiple struggles: with identity, with mental health difficulties, with generational trauma. Life goes on, and so do the struggles. Nothing is permanent except change.

Louisa Schnaithmann, author of Plague Love ($10.00), work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, Rogue Agent, Wine Cellar Press, and others. She is the consulting editor for ONE ART: a journal of poetry and lives in Philadelphia.

Alan Toltzis is the author of Mercy ($10.00) which follows the natural arc of the 13 attributes of mercy, a biblical formula for compassion and forgiveness. Each poem explores one attribute of mercy—from the first, being merciful before a person does anything wrong, to the last, washing away sins through pardon.
