Moonstone Arts Center

Wednesday May 13, 2026 - LIVE @ 7pm
2026-05-13 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Wednesday May 13, 2026 – 7pm
Live at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom
Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War
Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War offers a groundbreaking and vital perspective on war’s destruction of the natural world—the creatures, plants, soil, water, and atmosphere of Earth. In poems and contextual comments, 61 contemporary poets focus on military damages to the ecosystems on six continents and the moon. This compelling anthology alerts readers to environmental degradation of our planet while affirming nature’s resilience and regeneration.
Contributors: Ninety poems, each paired with an Author’s Note, by U. S. and international poets, including John Balaban, Gillian Clarke, Camille T. Dungy, Ferida Duraković, W.D. Ehrhart, Willian Heyen, Cynthia Hogue, Denise Low, Craig Santos Perez, Eric Paul Shaffer, Jillian Sullivan, Brian Turner, Pamela Uschuk, and Mai Der Vang.
“Bringing light to a dark place, these geographically and historically wide-reaching poems illuminate how war pulls, from under our feet, the earth on which we stand and pollutes even the air we breathe. Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War is unique in its scope and its focus on how war’s intolerable human cost is inseparable from the devastation of nature and its non-human animals—war against life itself. Though, like green shoots from a charred root, here, too, are poems of eloquent witness to nature’s humbling power of resilience and restoration.” —Eleanor Wilner – Chancellor, Academy of American Poets

C. Todd, co-editor of Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War. Her most recent books are Beyond Repair and the bilingual English–Lithuanian What Kept Me Awake? / Kas neleido užmigti?. A former Pew Fellow, she has poems in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Pedestal.

D. Ehrhart is a Marine Corps veteran of both the American War in Vietnam and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. His most recent books are Smart Fish Don’t Bite and Getting Shot At: Essays on War, Conflict, and Culture Clash.
Vernita Hall, author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color. Poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere.
Rick Kearns is a writer of Puerto Rican and European heritage. His poems have appeared in over 70 publications and six anthologies in the US and Argentina. He was Poet Laureate of Harrisburg. Rick and the Con Alma Quartet blended his poetry with established jazz tunes. A freelance journalist for over 35 years, he writes mostly about Latin American and Indigenous issues.
MaryAnn L. Miller is a poet, printmaker, and book artist. Miller has been thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Illness as a Form of Existence, Welcome to the Resistance, and Stained.
Michelle Servellon is a Salvadoran-American writer and graduate of Stockton University. She lives in South Jersey with her family—whose joy, grief, and anger often become the subject of her pieces. She now dedicates her time at the Long Branch Free Public Library working as a Technology Assistant.

Live Reading: Featured Poets 2025
2026-05-16 14:00 - 16:00 | The Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine Street, 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Saturday, May 16 2026 – 2pm ET
Philadelphia Central Library, Literature Department – 1901 Vine Street
Featured Poets from 2025
Moonstone presents over 100 poetry readings a year, creates a book with some of the presenters poems, and has a live and virtual reading. This is it.
Featured Poets (not all poets will be reading):

Nathalie
Anderson

Peter
Baroth

Grace
Bauer

Nilufer
Bektas

Phoebe
Brown

Christopher
Brown

Sarah
Browning

Sydney
Coffin

Marion
Cohen

Robert
Coles

C.M.
Crockford

CRAIG
CZURY

Eileen
D’Angelo

Bill
Ehrhart

Shannon
Frost Greenstein

Thalia
Geiger

Jenny
Grassl

Julia
Gwiazdowski

Brian
Harper

Faleeha
Hassan

Alison
Hicks

Dennis
Hinrichsen

Ditta Baron
Hoeber

Jones
Irwin

Mackenzie
Lerario

Lynn
Levin

Cameron
MacKenzie

Marjorie
Maddox

Emiliano
Martin

MJ
McGinn

Carol
Metellus

David
Milley

Jane Edna
Mohler

Nader
Rahimi

Sultana
Raza

Don
Riggs

Lynda Gene
Rymond

Amy
Small-McKinney

Karamo Muchuri
Sulieman

Mark
Svenvold

Tara
Tamburello

Elaine
Terranova

Bill
Van Buskirk

BJ
Ward

Bernardine
Watson

Von
Wise

Alexis
Young

Robert
Zaller

Wednesday May 20, 2026 @7pm - LIVE
2026-05-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Wednesday May 20, 2026 @7pm – LIVE at Fergie’s
Featuring: Chris Darrah, Olga Livshin, David Milley, Elijah B Pringle, III, and Sean Hanrahan as Host
Chris Darrah – Unwashed heathen wordsmith. Published several times in area zines. Member of the New Hope Beats. “Heretic Vicar” nome de plume.
Olga Livshin grew up in Ukraine and Russia. Her poetry appears in POETRY, The New York Times, Ploughshares and other journals.
David Milley’s recent work appears in 3rd Wednesdya, Bay Windows, RFD Magazine, Neologism Poetry Journal, and Last Syllable. His collection of poems, Tiller and Shears, will appear under the Aldrich Press imprint in fall 2026.
Elijah B Pringle, III has to credit his experience in Radio, TV, Stage and FIlm, has worked as a dancer, choreographer, actor, director, and vocalist. Facilitator for writing and Performance, Mr. Pringle has been published in almost fifty anthologies, journals, and books.
Sean Hanrahan Host – Open Reading Follows

Wednesday May 27, 2026 – 7pm LIVE
2026-05-27 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Wednesday May 27, 2026 – 7pm LIVE @ FERGIES
Featuring: Alexander Khan, Dustin Wright, and Mac Chandler as host
Alexander Khan is a poet, he is also a member of a big family in a small house, and a pharmacy staff for children. His work reflects these places and the different person he becomes in each of them.
Dustin Wright hails from somewhere between the Mississippi River delta and the North Mississippi hill country. He moved to West Philadelphia in 2023, but his poetry can only come from Mississippi.
Mac Chandler Host – Open Reading Follows

Live Broadcast: Philly Loves Poetry Interview and Readings Series Presents Diane Sahms
2026-06-09 18:30 - 21:30 | Moonstone Arts Center
Diane Sahms is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently,– of an octopus: an archite|x| tural awareness of words. She was awarded first place in Judith Stark’s Poetry Contest; Partisan Press’s Working People’s Poetry Contest; and recieved a poetry grant from AEVentures Foundation. Published in North American Review, Northern Virginia Review, Brushfire Literature & Arts Journal, Valley Voices, Sequestrum Literary Journal, The New Verse News, Ranger Magazine, Amsterdam Review & elsewhere. She’s Poetry Editor at North & Oxford. Charles S. Carr, Host

Live Poetry: Dan Kraines, Amy Saul-Zerby, & Rocky Wilson
2026-06-10 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Live Poetry: Dan Kraines, Amy Saul-Zerby & Rocky Wilson
Wednesday, June 10th @ 7pm
Live at Fergies Pub
Dan Kraines is a queer poet of Viennese, Bolivian, and Ukrainian heritage. Strap is his first full length book. Dan works at the writers residency Hawthornden Brooklyn on weekends, and for the poet Sharon Olds during the week. ” Dan Kraines is one of the most gifted literary minds that I have ever taught… daring, surprising, unconventional, a refreshment because everything he does proceeds from an original relation to his material.”– Frank Bidart, Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Half-light: Collected Poems.
Amy Saul-Zerby is the author of Paper Flowers, Imaginary Birds, Deep Camouflage, and Choose Your Own Beginning. Her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, The Chicago Review of Books, American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. She edits Voicemail Poems. Her newest poetry collection, If I Cannot Fly, is available through Serotonin Press in July, 2026.
Rocky Wilson is a poet, performance artist, and teacher who lives near the Delaware River in Camden. Rocky has been interpreting Whitman in schools and libraries, and for historial groups and at the Philly Fringe Festival. Rocky has , for the last 25 years, hosted Pizza and Poetry at A Slice of New York in Camden. It is one of the longest running poetry series in New Jersey.
Sean Lynch Host- Open Reading Follows

Live Poetry: Indran Amirthanayagam, Claudia Gary & Mike Jurkovic
2026-06-21 08:00 - 17:00 | PA
Live Poetry: Indran Amirthanayagam, Claudia Gary & Mike Jurkovic
Wednesday July 8, 2026 – 7pm – LIVE
Live at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street
Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, editor, publisher, translator, youtube host and diplomat. He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole and is the author of 30 books and translations. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, writes a weekly poem for Haiti en Marche and El Acento; has received fellowships from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture and the Macdowell Colony. He is the 2025 Matwaala Poet of Honor. His first book The Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize in the United States and is the 2025 Poet of Honor for Matwaala and IFLAC’s 2022 World Poet/Poeta Mundial. Indran comments on poetry at indranmx.substack.com
Claudia Gary’s new poetry book, Time and Other Solvents, is a story of healing. She lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Sonnets, Villanelles, Natural Meter, Persona Poems, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc. at The Writer’s Center (writer.org). She is also the author of Humor Me and chapbooks, and is an advisory editor for New Verse Review, health/science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal art songs and chamber music.
Mike Jurkovic is 2025-2027 Ulster County Poet Laureate. Published globally. Little reportable income. Collections: Circling Planes, Buckshot Reckoning, mooncussers, AmericanMental, 2016 Pushcart nominee. President Calling All Poets Series. Co-chair of the Music Fan Film Series, Rosendale Theatre, Rosendale, NY. CD reviews online All About Jazz and lightwoodpress.com Host of NuJazzXcursions, Mondays, 9-11a WVKR-FM 91.3 Vassar College. He loves Emily most of all.
Liz Allen Host – Open Reading Follows

Live Poetry: Vasiliki Argyris & William Lessard
2026-06-24 19:00 - 22:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Vasiliki Argyris looks for the threads that bind history, poetry, and walking the earth. Her work can be found in Voicemail Poems, Pamphilet, and Works & Days. William Lessard writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, and others, he is the Poetry & Hybrids editor at Heavy Feather Review.

Live Poetry: Michael J. Ivory Jr., Matthew Kosinski, & Mattie Phrances McDonald
2026-07-01 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Live Poetry: Michael J. Ivory Jr., Matthew Kosinski, & Mattie Phrances McDonald
Wednesday July 1, 2026 – 7pm – LIVE
Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street
Michael J. Ivory, Jr. is a Worker of the Word — in other words, a writer. A Miami, FL-native, he currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As the queer son of Pentecostal preachers, Michael lives out his sacred mission to affirm the inherent divinity of all people, but most especially Black queer “outcasts” like himself. He does this through his writing, which can be found on his Substack, as well as in his work with O, Miami Press, Iansá Mag, Duke Magazine, and Oxford American. He is currently working on his debut novel.
Matthew Kosinski is a poet, socialist and occultist from Philadelphia. His books include Alone in the White Marble City (NDR, 2020), Your Human Shape (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and Year of the Inverted Star (Broken Sleep Books, 2026).
Mattie Phrances McDonald (they/she/bun) is an engineer, musician, and writer. Along with their solo project Betty’s Eyes, she is the guitarist/vocalist in Booklegger, creates art and circuits for Electrofoods, Ultd., and co-founded the queer- and trans-centered sandlot baseball team the Quaker City Cryptids. Bun lives in their adoptive home of Philadelphia with two of her partners and two kitties. Their work can be found at booklegger.bandcamp.com, electrofoods.space, and on instagram at @bettys.eyes and @cryptidsbaseball
Warren Longmire Host – Open Reading Follows

Freedom 250? - Virtual Poetry Event
2026-07-05 14:00 - 16:00 | Virtual
The United States is a federal republic whose people benefit from a vibrant political system, a strong rule-of-law tradition, robust freedoms of expression and religious belief, and a wide array of other civil liberties.
However, in recent years its democratic institutions have suffered erosion, as reflected in rising political polarization and extremism, partisan pressure on the electoral process, mistreatment and dysfunction in the criminal justice and immigration systems, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity, and political influence.

Link to Register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/f7cHnTsGSLGnHbzv4dA2jQ

Live Poetry: Indran Amirthanayagam, Claudia Gary, & Mike Jurkovic
2026-07-08 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Wednesday July 8, 2026 – 7pm – LIVE
Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, editor, publisher, translator, youtube host and diplomat. He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole and is the author of 30 books and translations. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, writes a weekly poem for Haiti en Marche and El Acento; has received fellowships from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture and the Macdowell Colony. He is the 2025 Matwaala Poet of Honor. His first book The Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize in the United States and is the 2025 Poet of Honor for Matwaala and IFLAC’s 2022 World Poet/Poeta Mundial. Indran comments on poetry at indranmx.substack.com
Claudia Gary’s new poetry book, Time and Other Solvents, is a story of healing. She lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Sonnets, Villanelles, Natural Meter, Persona Poems, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc. at The Writer’s Center (writer.org). She is also the author of Humor Me and chapbooks, and is an advisory editor for New Verse Review, health/science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal art songs and chamber music.
Mike Jurkovic is 2025-2027 Ulster County Poet Laureate. Published globally. Little reportable income. Collections: Circling Planes, Buckshot Reckoning, mooncussers, AmericanMental, 2016 Pushcart nominee. President Calling All Poets Series. Co-chair of the Music Fan Film Series, Rosendale Theatre, Rosendale, NY. CD reviews online All About Jazz and lightwoodpress.com Host of NuJazzXcursions, Mondays, 9-11a WVKR-FM 91.3 Vassar College. He loves Emily most of all.
Liz Allen Host – Open Reading Follows

Painting in the Dark: An Artistic Collaboration
2026-07-11 16:00 - 19:00 | City Arts Salon, 5838 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA, 19144, United States
Saturday, July 11th, 2026 – 4 to 7 pm
City Arts Salon, 5838 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19144
Painting in the Dark interrogates the hideousness of war, addiction, and delusion with the consolation concluding poet John Lavin’s final poem, –but that’s all we have is each other. Illustrators Gregorio Torres, III and Janelle Robinson have joined Lavin in mapping the extreme pain and pleasure inherent in this collection’s narrative arc: a journey from darkness to light. Just such solidarity is engrained in this book’s search within the darkness imposed by a king’s tyranny (“Goya Under House Arrest”) and elaborated in erotic euphoria, colonial oppression, exile, and erasure. John Lavin was Gregorio’s drama teacher and ten years after Greg’s graduation Lavin attended an exhibition of Torres and his partner, Janelle Robinson’s art in New York (2023) where they began the conversation that inspired this collection. Event will combine reading from Collection of Poems, Musical Performance and Reflection.

Philly Loves Poetry: Jim Timpane
2026-07-14 18:30 - 19:30 | PA
Philly Loves Poetry Interview and Readings Series with Jim Timpane
Moonstone Poetry @ PhillyCAM
Watch on the PhillyCAM website
Or Cable 66/966HD/967 or Verizon FIOS, 29/30 in Philadelphia.
John Timpane was a professor and lecturer in English, first at Rutgers University and later at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. In 1997 The Philadelphia Inquirer, hired him as Opinion Page Editor, and later the Books Editor and Theater Critic. He retired from The Inquirer in 2019. Since The Inquirer, John has freelanced fulltime. He specializes in ghostwriting autobiographies; arts reviewing, especially in poetry and theater; and writing seminars. He keeps working at the craft of versemaking.
Charles S. Carr, Host

Live Poetry: Jessica Buten, Caroline Furr, Ben Saff, Abby Minor & Amy Thatcher
2026-07-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Live Poetry: Jessica Buten, Caroline Furr, Ben Saff, Abby Minor & Amy Thatcher
Wednesday July 15, 2026 – 7pm
Live at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom Street
Jessica Buten is a poet from Bucks County.
Caroline Furr has a decades long history in painting, sculpture, interior and surface design, gallery and museum work. At this less distracting time of life she has turned to her accumulation of written work as inspiration for new words.
Ben Saff is a technologist by trade and a creative when the moon comes knocking at his window, asking for a poem. He lives in Philadelphia with his cat, Simba.
Abby Minor lives in the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania, where she works on poems, essays, gardens, collages, and projects exploring regional and reproductive politics. Her poems and essays have appeared in Fence, the American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Bombay Gin, Sixth Finch, Harvard Review, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere.
Amy Thatcher is a native Philadelphian. Her poems have been published in Denver Quarterly, Split LIp, The Journal, Copper Nickel, Salt Hill and other journals. Her first manuscript, Weird Girl, won the 2025 Charles B Wheeler Prize and will be published by the Ohio State University Press in February 2027.
Anne-Adele Wight Host – Open Reading Follows

Censorship: A Panel Discussion with Larry Robin, Ernest Hilbert & Keith Kopka
2026-07-18 14:00 - 16:00 | The Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine Street, 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, United States
Censorship: A Panel Discussion with Larry Robin, Ernest Hilbert, & Keith Kopka
Sat, July 18, 2026 @ 2:00 P.M.
Rare Book Department at Parkway Central Library
Cost: FREEElkins Library, 3rd FloorA discussion on censorship with Larry Robin, Director of Moonstone Arts Center and former owner of Robin’s Book Store, which was the Philadelphia defendant in the Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller) pornography case in 1961. Larry will be joined by poet and rare book dealer Ernest Hilbert, and Keith Kopka, Writers Resist and Senior Editor at Narrative Magazine and Poetry Editor at Philadelphia Stories.
This program is presented in association with Book Complaints and the Defense of Intellectual Freedom, an exhibition from Special Collections and will take place in the Rare Book Department’s Elkins Library.
The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.
