Sign up! 7:00 p.m.

7:15 p.m. – Open mic

8:00 p.m. – Featured Reader

This month join us for Aricka M. Foreman!

photo courtesy of Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Aricka Foreman is a Cave Canem Fellow and educator. An English major at Wayne State University, she was the recipient of the Hatch Award, as well as the Loughead-Eldredge and Burke-Sheill scholarships. Her work has appeared in The Drunken Boat, Torch Poetry: A Journal for African American Women, Minnesota Review, Union Station Magazine, Bestiary Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, and she is a Poetry Editor for Muzzle Magazine. Foreman is a Midwest Regional Slam Champ, coached the 2011 Detroit Brave New Voices Youth Slam Team, and co-chaired the Women of the World Poetry Slam. She has taught poetry workshops through several programs including Prison Creative Arts Project, Y Arts Outreach, and Young Chicago Authors. She is currently employed by InsideOut as the Community Projects Coordinator and a Voices writer at Southeastern HS.

8:00 – Featured Readers, Allison Kennedy and Gahl Liberzon.

Allison Kennedy started writing her junior year of high school to make some friends and stayed because poetry provided so much for her to fall in love with. She participated in the Ann Arbor Neutral Zone Volume Youth Poetry Project and the associated slams, placing in the finals in 2010 and winning in 2011. She attended Brave New Voices for two years on the Ann Arbor Youth Slam Team and is now writing and performing with the Kalamazoo College Poetry Collective. She’s now a student, spending free time watering tropical plants at her job and forcing anyone within twenty feet to read poems by Patrick Rosal, Angel Nafis and Jeffrey McDaniel. She’s excited about most things, and especially kicking it with Gahl Liberzon.

Gahl Liberzon is a senior at the University of Michigan Residential College and School of Education, studying Creative Writing and English Education. A native of Ann Arbor and Community High Alumnus, Gahl learned to cut his teeth in the Neutral Zone’s premier nexus of aneurysm-inducing wordsmithery and fearless social advocacy, the Volume Youth Poetry Project. Gahl is a two-time member of the University of Michigan Poetry Slam team, a three-time coach for the Ann Arbor Youth Slam team, and a recipient of numerous fancy writing awards, including the 2011 Summer Hopwood award for Poetry for the poetry manuscript “Come Back,” which is being released as a chapbook in a forthcoming limited edition by the same name.

8:00 – Featured Readers, Laszlo Slomovits and Jennifer Burd.

Laszlo Slomovits is one of the twin brothers in Ann Arbor’s children’s music duo, Gemini. In addition to his music for children, he has set to music and recorded five CDs of the poetry of the ancient Sufi mystics, Rumi and Hafiz — http://poetryintosong.com/. Jennifer Burd has had poetry published in numerous journals, and her first full-length book of poems, Body and Echo, was published by PlainView Press in 2010. Laszlo and Jennifer have given a number of joint readings that feature both their solo work — Laszlo singing Rumi and Hafiz poems, Jennifer reading her poems accompanied by guitar improvisations — as well as poems they’ve written together, some of which Laszlo has set to music.

Jill Halpern is a local teacher, activist, poet, storyteller, and tree-and-people-hugger whose award-winning writing celebrates nature, community, kids, peace & justice, and love in all its wild and beautiful forms.  She has delighted in sharing her work in diverse venues ranging from Tellabration and Island Park Storydance to the local Zen temple, Lucy Ann Lance Holiday Radio Show, and beyond.

Josie Kearns has published Life After the Line, a non-fiction book from Wayne State University Press, New Numbers, New Issues Press, The Theory of Everything, Mayapple Press (2009) and Alphabet of the Ocean (2009) from March Street Press. Her work has been anthologized in Are You Experienced?, Boomer Girls, and Sweeping Beauty all from Iowa University Press, and in Contemporary Michigan Poetry, Songs From Unsung Worlds (New York, Science and poetry), Passages North Anthology and others. Her poetry has been published in The Iowa Review, The Georgia Review, Passages North and others and her work New Numbers won the first MacLeod Grobe Prize given by Poetry Northwest. Her work has also appeared in the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. She teaches creative writing and literature and composition at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor full-time. She has won three Hopwood Awards including a Major Award and four Creative Artist Grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts, now ArtServe.

New Millennium Poetry Readings are held on the third Tuesday of each month, at Sweetwater’s in Ann Arbor (123 West Washington) from 7 to 8:30. Bring your friends, bring your poems, bring your ears!

Francine J. Harris is a Cave Canem fellow and has work appearing in Rattle, Callaloo, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Indiana Review and in an anthology by the AIDS Project of Los Angeles: To be left with the body. She has participated in the Callaloo workshop, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and is the author of a recent chapbook, Between Old Trees. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Michigan.

New Millennium Poetry Readings are held on the third Tuesday of each month, at Sweetwater’s in Ann Arbor (123 West Washington) from 7 to 8:30. Bring your friends, bring your poems, bring your ears!

For those interested in hearing more of Perry’s excellent work, he’ll be appearing as part of the Robert Hayden Reading Series at Detroit’s Scarab Club with Terry Blackhawk and Ed Hirsch, December 9, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. — 217 Farnsworth, Detroit, MI, 48202.

www.terrymblackhawk.com/cal.html

Stay tuned for updates on November’s featured reader, and spread the word about New Millennium Poetry…