BookWoman 2nd Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open Mic: Sandi Stromberg
Thursday, May 9, 2024, 7:15 p.m. – 9:00 p.m CDT
Hybrid: In-store at 5501 N. Lamar #A-105 and on Zoom
Zoom event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-hybrid-poetry-and-open-mic-featuring-sandi-stromberg-tickets-851973835677
Feature Sandi Stromberg’s full-length collection, Frogs Don’t Sing Red (Kelsay Books, April 2023), includes several works nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Stromberg is an editor at The Ekphrastic Review and has served as an editor for two anthologies: Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (Mutabilis press, 2015) and the ekphrastic anthology Echoes of the Cordillera (Museum of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University, 2018), where poems are in conversation with photographs by Jim Bones.
Most recently, Stromberg’s poetry has appeared in Panoply: The Literary Zine, San Pedro River Review, The Ekphrastic Review, MockingHeart Review, Woodland, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose. Her poetry, translated into Dutch, can be found at Brabant Cultureel and on the website of Dutch poet, Albert Hagenaars.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
If you’re joining us in-store, please bring your mask, as BookWoman continues to require them in the spirit of protecting the vulnerable among us. And if you’re joining via Zoom, be sure to log into Zoom with your email and password before accessing the meeting.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open Mic: Kelly Ann Ellis
Thursday, April 11, 2024 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. CDT
Zoom registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-hybrid-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-wkelly-ann-ellis-tickets-851970515747
Feature Kelly Ann Ellis will read from her first full-length poetry collection, The Hungry Ghost Diner (Lamar University Literary Press, 2023).
Kelly Ann Ellis lives and writes in Houston, TX. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Houston, where she currently teaches. A member of Poets in the Loop, she is the co-founder of hotpoet, a literary nonprofit and small press that publishes the online journal, Equinox, for which Ellis serves as managing editor. Her work has been included in several juried poetry festivals and has appeared in various journals and anthologies. Her collaborative cinepoems were featured in Houston’s REELpoetry Festival for three years consecutive years, and her poetry was showcased in the Houston Fringe Festival in 2019 in the music and dance production, It’s About Love. Her fiction placed 2nd in The Short Story Show‘s 2020 contest and was re-released in a “best-of” podcast in 2021. Ellis was twice nominated in 2020 for a Pushcart prize, and in 2023 Lamar University Literary Press published her poetry collection, The Hungry Ghost Diner.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. You can read the “virtual interview” with Kelly Ann Ellis here.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open Mic: Kevin Prufer
Thurday, March 14, 2024 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. CDT
Zoom event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-hybrid-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-w-kevin-prufer-tickets-833413029807?aff=oddtdtcreator
Houston’s Kevin Prufer will be our in-store feature. Prufer’s ninth book of poetry is The Fears (Copper Canyon, 2023), and his first novel is Sleepaway (Acre Books, 2024). His previous poetry books have been long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, short listed for the Rilke Prize (2015 and 2011), received the 2020 Julie Suk Award, and been included on “Best of the Year” lists at The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, BookList, and elsewhere. The editor of several volumes on literary translation and publishing, among others, he is Professor of English at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where he also directs The Unsung Masters Series (www.unsungmasters.org).
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. You can read Cindy’s “virtual interview” with Kevin here.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open Mic: karla k. morton
Thursday, February 8, 2024 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. CST
Zoom registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-hybrid-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-karla-k-morton-tickets-791686314077
karla k. morton will be our feature for this hybrid in-store/ Zoom event. morton, omnium curiositatum explorator, has sixteen poetry collections. A National Heritage Wrangler Award Winner, twice an Indies National Book Award winner, Foreword Book Award winner, SPUR Award Winner, Betsy Colquitt Award Winner and E2C Grant recipient, she is guest editor for TCU Press’ Selected Works of Walt McDonald. She is published in journals such as American Life in Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southword Literary Journal, Boulevard, Lascaux Review, Comstock Review, New Ohio Review, the New Mexico Poetry Anthology, Atlanta Review forthcoming in The Southern Review, and is short-listed for Ireland’s O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition. Her book, “The National Parks: A Century of Grace” (TCU Press) is historic, as it is the first book of poetry ever written in-situ from all 62 of 62 National Parks. Morton gives a percentage of royalties from this book back to the National Parks. She is a graduate of Texas A&M University and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. She is the 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate and a nominee for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
BookWoman Hybrid Poetry Reading: Lisa Molina, Tina Posner and Bree Rolfe
Wednesday, January 24, 2024 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. CST
On-lIne event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-hybrid-poetry-reading-lisa-molina-tina-posner-and-bree-rolfe-tickets-694411482437
BookWoman welcomes three local poets who will be reading work from their recent and upcoming collections. The event will be in-store (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, 78751) and on Zoom. In-store participants will be required to wear masks in the interest of the vulnerable among us.
Lisa Molina is a writer, and recently retired teacher. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, adult children, and one-year old calico cat, who acts like a teenager. Molina’s poems, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published in numerous journals in North America and Europe. Womb Worlds was released in March 2023 by Finishing Line Press, and is her first chapbook published in print. It was recently named Finalist in two categories in the International Book Awards, sponsored by American Book Fest.
Tina Posner lives in Austin, TX. She creates classroom materials and has authored over a dozen books of poetry and nonfiction for students. Her poems have appeared in assorted journals and anthologies. She has an MFA from Pacific University and is a consulting associate at Next Page Press. Her encounters with famous poets include being insulted by John Ashbury on an elevator and getting a spontaneous kiss from John Giorno in the bathroom line at St. Mark’s. Ask her, and she’ll gladly tell you more.
Bree A. Rolfe is a writer, union organizer, and McKinney-Vento liaison in Austin, TX. She lives with five cats and Cystic Fibrosis both of which bring her much joy and frustration. Her first chapbook, Who’s Going to Love the Dying Girl, was released in September of 2021 by Unsolicited Press.
Contact BookWoman to order your copy of Womb Worlds, Who’s Going to Love the Dying Girl, and other titles for in-store pickup, curbside delivery and direct-from-warehouse shipping: bookwomanaustin@gmail.com; (512)472-2785; https://ebookwoman.com .
Cindy Huyser hosts. Be sure to log in with your email address if you’re joining us via Zoom.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open Mic: Amanda Johnston
Thursday, December 14, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-hybrid-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-amanda-johnston-tickets-753013041277
The BookWoman Second Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open mic is delighted to welcome our feature, 2024 Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston, in-store at BookWoman, 5501 N. Lamar #A-105 and on Zoom. Cindy Huyser hosts this in-person / Zoom hybrid reading, and a “round robin” open mic follows.
Amanda Johnston is a writer and artist. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, The Moth, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, and the anthologies, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, American Short Fiction, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founder of Torch Literary Arts.
You’ll find the newest “virtual interview” with Amanda here.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic: Unknotting the Line Showcase
Thursday, November 9, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
On-line Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-second-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-unknotting-the-line-tickets-735858942907?aff=oddtdtcreator
The Central Texas poets of the newest Dos Gatos Press Southwestern anthology will be featured for this virtual edition of the 2nd Thursday series. Featured contributors Claire Vogel Camargo, Diana Conces, Lucy Griffith and host Cindy Huyser will be joined by Dos Gatos Press’ co-founder and co-editor of the anthology, David Meischen.
Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose is the fifth in Dos Gatos Press’ “Poetry of the Southwestern United States” series. The 120 poems of this anthology showcase the variety and flexibility of poetic prose forms from haibun, tanka prose and cheribun to flash fiction, flash nonfiction and beyond.
From the forward: What happens when a poem escapes from the stricture of the line? When syntax spools across the page, margin to margin, sentence spilling into sentence? Is there a spark of some kind that transforms a paragraph into a prose poem? Does the prose poem actually exist—as tangibly as the mustang? Or is it a mythical beast, literature’s unicorn? We take the mustang point of view.
About our featured readers:
Claire Vogel Camargo, author of the ekphrastic chapbook, Iris Opening , jumped into haibun in 2017 and has won numerous awards for her haiku.
Diana Conces, author of the chapbook Blue Skies and Blacktop, the short story collection Temporary Things and a novel, The Golden Feather, is a Pushcart-nominated poet writing in Central Texas.
Lucy Griffith is the author of the poetry collections We Make a Tiny Herd (Main Street Rag Press, 2019) and Wingbeat Atlas (FlowerSong Press, 2022), and lives in Comfort, Texas beside the Guadalupe River.
Cindy Huyser is the author of the chapbook Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems (Blue Horse Press, 2014) and co-editor with Scott Wiggerman of Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Person Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016), the second in Dos Gatos Press’ “Poetry of the Southwestern United States” series.
David Meischen, along with Scott Wiggerman, is a founder and editor at Dos Gatos Press, publisher of Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose. Their “virtual interview” offers insights into the world of small press publishing.
Cindy Huyser hosts; a “round robin” open mic follows.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open Mic: SG Huerta
Thursday, October 12, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
On-line event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-hybrid-poetry-reading-open-mic-featuring-sg-huerta-tickets-706124235597?aff=oddtdtcreator
SG Huerta, who recently earned their MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) from Texas State, will be our in-store feature for this hybrid in-store/Zoom reading.
SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer from Dallas. They are the Poetry Editor of Abode Press, a new intersectional Texan press. A 2023 Roots Wounds Words Fellow, they also serve as a nonfiction co-editor for ANMLY and memoir reader for Split Lip Magazine. SG is the author of two poetry chapbooks, The Things We Bring with Us (Headmistress Press 2021) and Last Stop (Defunkt Magazine 2023). Their work has appeared in Houston City Hall, The Offing, Split Lip Magazine, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. They live in Texas with their partner and two cats. Find them at https://sghuertawriting.com
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic: Gabrielle Langley and John Milkereit
Thursday, September 12, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
On-line Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-gabrielle-langley-and-john-milkereit-tickets-693305374037?aff=oddtdtcreator
Houston poets Gabrielle Langley and John Milkereit supported each other in their work on manuscripts-in-process, and both now have new books. Please join us in-store or on-line for this feature “double-header;” Gabrielle and John will be joining us via Zoom .
Gabrielle Langley is a poet and author of Fairy Tale (Sable Books, 2022) and Azaleas on Fire (Sable Books, 2019). Ms. Langley is also co-editor of Red Sky: Poetry on the global epidemic of violence against women (Sable Books – 2016). She has been featured in the Houston Chronicle and the Huffington Post as one of Houston’s significant poets. and was selected by Italian design house, Max Mara, to be the Featured Poet for their first-time U.S. poetry event, the proceeds from which were donated to the Barbara Bush Literacy Foundation, which also receives 100% of the profits from sales of Azaleas on Fire; she has also served on the selection committee for Public Poetry’s Library Reading Series. Ms. Langley works during the day as a licensed mental health professional who served as front-line “essential staff” throughout the COVID pandemic. To safeguard her own mental health, she writes poetry and dances Argentine tango at night. Additional information about this poet can be found at www.gabriellelangley.com.
John Milkereit resides in Houston, Texas working as a mechanical engineer, and has completed an M.F.A. in Creative Wrigting at the Ranier Writing Workshop. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently A Place Comfortable with Fire (Lamar University Literary Press, December 2022), and two chapbooks published by Pudding House Press. His work has appeared in various literary journals including Naugatuck River Review, San Pedro River Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic: Anthony Sutton and Charlie Clark
Thursday, August 10, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Zoom Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-wanthony-sutton-and-charlie-clark-tickets-645752060797
BookWoman is delighted to welcome Anthony Sutton and Charlie Clark as our in-store features for this hybrid in-store/Zoom event celebrating the publication of Sutton’s debut poetry collection, Particles of a Stranger Light (Veliz Books, 2023).
Anthony Sutton resides on former Akokisas, Atakapa, Karankawa, and Sana land (currently named Houston, TX), as an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor fellow at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing and Literature PhD program and teaches in the community for Grackle and Grackle. Anthony’s poetry has appeared in Grist, guesthouse, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Oversound, Quarter After Eight, Southern Indiana Review, Zone 3, the anthology In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy, and elsewhere. With Michael C. Peterson, they are co-editor of the Unsung Masters volume on Black Arts-adjacent poet Tom Postell.
Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in The New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. A 2019 NEA fellow and recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he is the author of The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2020). He lives in Austin, TX.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic: Dora Robinson
Thursday, July 13, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-hybrid-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-wdora-robinson-tickets-645106128797
Dora Robinson will be our in-store feature for this hybrid in-store / Zoom event. Robinson is the author of the debut poetry collection Last Exit, which was inspired by her respect and admiration for the Great Plains which informs her heritage and family experiences.
Dora Robinson, along with her two older brothers Chuck and Harry, grew up un a horse breeding farm in Southern Wisconsin. She emerged from her mother’s womb carrying a packet of pencils in one hand and a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson in the other. Robinson’s poems have appeared in journals such as Coal City Review, Underwood Press, The Texas Poetry Calendar, and others. She lives in Austin Texas with her spouse, Beverly. She loves seeing lightning shoot across the sky and Tex-Mex.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. You’ll find Cindy’s “virtual interview” with Dora here.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic featuring Lisha Adela Garcia
Thursday, June 8, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-lisha-adela-garcia-tickets-600654954137
The BookWoman 2nd Thursday series is delighted to welcome poet Lisha Adela Garcia, who will be joining us via Zoom for this hybrid Zoom/in-store event.
Lisha Adela García has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and currently resides in Texas with her beloved four-legged children. Her books, A Rope of Luna and Blood Rivers, were published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco. Her chapbook, This Stone Will Speak was published by Pudding House Press. In addition, she is widely published in various journals including the Boston Review, Crab Orchard Review, Border Senses, Muse and Mom Egg Review.
García leads the Wyrdd Writers, a writing group based in San Antonio with participants from Kerrville and San Marcos and co-facilitates a Poetic Medicine group named Poetry Exile Group founded by Jungian analyst, Dr. James Brandenburg. She also facilitates Poetic Medicine classes in Social Justice, Archetypes and other topics, and is a candidate for certification from the Institute of Poetic Medicine.
García has served as a judge for various poetry prizes, most recently the Chicago Poetry Prize of Chicago’s Poetry Society, and has given workshops for a variety of colleges and universities. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and was a recipient of the San Antonio Tri-Centennial Poetry Prize.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Please note: BookWoman requires masks for all in-store participants. On-line participants will need to be logged into Zoom to access the event.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open Mic featuring Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson
Thursday, May 11, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-open-mic-wandrea-vocab-sanderson-tickets-556328562707
San Antonio Poet Laureate Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson will be our in-person feature for this hybrid in-store/Zoom event. Sanderson is the first Black Poet Laureate of San Antonio, 2020-2023 and a San Antonio native. Her debut poetry collection, She Lives in Music, was published by FlowerSong Press in 2020.
Sanderson’s dynamic performance style is an originally crafted fusion of spoken word poetry, hip hop and soulful rhythm and blues. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including: Dream Voice 2018, People’s Choice Award 2019, Best Literary Advocate 2021 San Antonio Magazine, and The Arts and Letters Award by Friends of San Antonio Public Library in 2020. Best Local Poet 2021 by The San Antonio Current. She serves as a Teaching Artist for Gemini Ink.
In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Vocab was recently awarded a NPN Creation Fund grant for her upcoming theater production, The Seasoned Woman co-commissioned by The Carver and Art2Action. Her music is available on all music streaming platforms. https://andreavocabsanderson.com
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. And don’t forget to check out CIndy’s interview with Vocab here.
Please note: BookWoman requires masks for all in-store participants. On-line participants will have to be logged into Zoom to access the event.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open Mic: Roja Chamankar
Thursday, April 13, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-w-roja-chamankar-tickets-556253197287
Persian poet Roja Chamankar will be our feature for this hybrid in-store/Zoom event. Born in Borazjan in southern Iran in 1981, Chamankar is a poet and filmmaker with an academic background in Dramatic Literature and Film Studies. She has published eleven books of poetry in Iran, co-written four books for children, and translated two collections of poems from French into Persian. Her works have been translated into several other languages and have won a number of national and international awards, including the Greek Nikos Gatsos prize in 2016. Roja has participated in numerous poetry readings and festivals in Iran, France, Sweden, Austria, Malta, and the United States. A collection of her poems titled Dying in A Mother Tongue was published in November 2018 by the University of Texas Press.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Please note: BookWoman requires masks for all in-store participants. On-line participants must be logged into Zoom to access the event.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Hybrid Poetry Reading and Open Mic featuring Katie Hoerth
Thursday, March 9, 2023 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. CST in-store and on-line:
In-Store: 5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, Texas 78751 (masks required)
Zoom Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-featuring-katie-hoerth-tickets-536611097237
BookWoman welcomes Katherine “Katie” Hoerth, who will join us via Zoom for this hybrid Zoom/in-store event. Hoerth teaches at Lamar University and is the poetry for the Lamar University Literary Press.
Hoerth is the author of five poetry collections, including Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2022), The Lost Chronicles of Slue Foot Sue (Angelina River Press, 2018), Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots (Lamar University Literary Press, 2014), and The Garden Uprooted (Slough Press, 2012). She is the recipient of the 2021 Poetry of the Plains Prize from North Dakota State University Press and the 2015 Helen C. Smith Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book of poetry in Texas. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines including Literary Imagination (Oxford University Press), Valparaiso Review, and I-70. She is an assistant professor at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press.
You’ll find Cindy’s interview with Katherine here: https://cindyhuyser.wordpress.com/2023/03/05/a-virtual-interview-with-katherine-hoerth/
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Please note: BookWoman requires masks for all in-store participants. On-line participants must be logged into Zoom to access the event.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic with Adrienne Christian – In Person and On Zoom
February 9, 2023 7:15 .m. to 9:00 p.m.
Zoom Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-and-open-mic-featuring-adrienne-christian-tickets-498453968237
Please join us for the first of our hybrid in-store / Zoom 2nd Thursday events! Our feature, Adrienne Christian, will be at BookWoman (5500 N. Lamar), and we will also be connecting via Zoom. Please note that BookWoman requires masks at all in-person events.
Adrienne Christian is a writer and fine art photographer, and the author of three poetry collections – Worn (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021), A Proper Lover, (Mainstreet Rag, 2017), and 12023 Woodmont Avenue (Willow Lit, 2003). Her poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography have been featured in various journals including Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review, CALYX, phoebe, No Tokens, World Literature Today, and the Los Angeles Review as the Editor’s Choice. Her work has been anthologized widely and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. In 2020, her poem “Wedding Dress” won the Common Ground Review Poetry Award. In 2016, she won the Rita Dove International Poetry Award and in 2007 the University of Michigan’s Five Under Ten Young Alumni Award.
Adrienne is a fellow of Cave Canem and Callaloo writing residencies, and has been featured on panels by Ms. Magazine and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She has served as editor or jury member for various prizes including the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, the Penumbra Poetry and Haiku Contest, the Cave Canem Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and the Nebraska Poetry Society Poetry Award. She is an associate editor at Backbone Press, and founder of the Blue Ridge Mountains Writing Collective, and holds a BA from the University of Michigan (2001), an MFA from Pacific University (2011), and a PhD from the University of Nebraska (2020).
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Please remember to log into Zoom for on-line access to this event.
Special event: In Celebration of Naming the Ghost: A reading featuring Emily Hockaday, Matthew Zapruder and Diana Marie Delgado
January 19, 2023 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-presents-naming-the-ghost-an-evening-of-poetry-tickets-483999233737
Please join BookWoman for a “conversation in poetry” celebrating the publication of Emily Hockaday’s inaugural poetry collection, Naming the Ghost (Cornerstone Press, 2022). Reading with Emily will be Matthew Zapruder and Diana Marie Delgado.
Emily Hockaday is the author of five chapbooks and another full-length forthcoming in 2023. Her work has also been featured in NPR’s RadioLab. In NAMING THE GHOST, a woman who loses her father and becomes a new mother now has to deal with a ghost that haunts her home. As the speaker learns more about the ghost, she realizes that it is something more—it is her grief and chronic illness manifested in another form. Heartfelt and forthright, this collection navigates important questions of health, life, and new parenthood, giving way to “otherworldly, yet grounded” (Jared Harél) poems. You’ll find Cindy Huyser’s “virtual interview” with Emily here.
Diana Marie Delgado is the author of the chapbook Late Night Talks with Men I think I Trust (Center for the Book Arts, 2015) and Tracing the Horse (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2019). A National Endowment for the Arts fellow and recipient of numerous scholarship and grants, she currently resides in Tucson where she is the Literary Director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. She holds MFA degrees in poetry from both Columbia University and the University of California, Riverside.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (2010), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear (2014), both from Copper Canyon Press, as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose, from Ecco Press/Harper Collins in August 2017. An Associate Professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor at large at Wave Books, and from 2016-7 held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, CA.
Featured Reader: Lisa Dordal
Thursday, December 8, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-virtual-poetry-reading-featuring-lisa-dordal-tickets-465099564317
In this reading originally scheduled for May, Lisa Dordal will be reading from her new collection, Water Lessons (Black Lawrence Press, April 2022). Dordal teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University and is also the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, and the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Narrative, RHINO, The Sun, The New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Greensboro Review, Ninth Letter, and CALYX. Her website is lisadordal.com.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Lisa’s “virtual interview” is here.
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-presents-ramona-reeves-and-carrie-grinstead-tickets-468168022157
BookWoman is delighted to present Ramona Reeves and Carrie Grinstead in conversation on Zoom about their newly-released award-winning debut short story collections. Cindy Huyser hosts.
Ramona Reeves’ interlinked story collection, It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published in October. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southampton Review, Bayou Magazine, New South, Superstition Review, Texas Highways and others. A native of Alabama, she currently lives in Texas with her wife.
Carrie Grinstead grew up in central Wisconsin and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Daniel, and their dogs. Her horse lives nearby. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House, The Masters Review Anthology, Joyland, and elsewhere. Her first book, I Have Her Memories Now, won the Howling Bird Press Fiction Prize and was published in October.
Contact BookWoman to order your copies of It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories, I Have Her Memories Now, and other titles for in-store pickup, curbside delivery and shipping: bookwomanaustin@gmail.com; (512)472-2785; https://ebookwoman.com.
Please note this event requires participants to be logged into Zoom.
Cindy Huyser hosts.
Featured Reader: Amy Shimshon-Santo
Thursday, November 10, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-w-amy-shimshon-santo-tickets-414854941297
Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a writer and educator who believes that creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. She is author of Catastrophic Molting (Flowersong Press, 2022), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (Unsolicited Press, 2020), the limited edition chapbook Endless Bowls of Sky (Placeholder Press, 2020), and numerous peer-reviewed essays (GeoHumanities; Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice; UC Press, Imagining America, SUNY Press, Writers Project Ghana). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, ArtPlace America, Zócalo Public Square, Entropy, Tilt West, Boom CA, Yes Poetry, and are featured on Google Arts & Culture. Amy has been nominated for an Emmy Award, three Pushcart Prizes in poetry and creative nonfiction, a Rainbow Reads Award, and was a finalist for the Nightboat Book Poetry Prize. She has edited two books amplifying community voices: Et Al: New Voices in Arts Management with Genevieve Kaplan (Illinois Open Publishing Network, 2022) and Arts = Education (UC Press, 2010). Her teaching career has spanned research universities, community centers, K-12 schools, arts organizations, and spaces of incarceration.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Read the “virtual interview” with Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo: https://cindyhuyser.wordpress.com/2022/11/08/a-virtual-interview-with-amy-shimshon-santo/
If you happened to miss the reading, you’re in luck: Dr. Shimshon-Santo graciously allowed us to record it.
Featured Reader: Melissa Studdard
Thursday, October 13, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-second-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-w-melissa-studdard-tickets-414817900507
Melissa Studdard is the author of fives books, icluding the poetry collections Dear Selection Committee (Jackleg Press, May 17, 2022) and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (Saint Julian Press, 2014), the poetry chapbook, Like a Bird with a Thousand WIngs (Saint Julian Press, 2020), and the young adult novel Six Weeks to Yehidah (All Things That Matter Press, 2011). Her work has been featured by NPR, PBS, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Houston Matters, and has also appeared in a wide variety of periodicals, such as POETRY, Kenyon Review, Psychology Today, New Ohio Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, and Poets & Writers.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Allyson Whipple
Thursday, September 8, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-virtual-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-allyson-whipple-tickets-389991443907
Allyson Whipple is the editor and host of the Culinary Saijiki blog and podcast (https://culinarysaijiki.com/), a project devoted to the intersection of food and haiku. During her 14 years as a Texas resident, she served as board president of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, co-editor of the Texas Poetry Calendar, and was co-creator of the interactive fiction Choice: Texas (www.playchoicetexas.com). Allyson is also the author of the chapbooks Come Into the World Like That (Five Oaks Press) and We’re Smaller Than We Think We Are (Finishing Line Press). She now lives in St. Louis, Missouri with her family.
CIndy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Check out the “virtual interview” with Allyson here: https://cindyhuyser.wordpress.com/2022/09/04/a-virtual-interview-with-allyson-whipple/
Featured Reader: Alexandra Van de Kamp
Thursday, August 11, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-alexandra-van-de-kamp-tickets-354850937707
Alexandra van de Kamp is Executive Director for Gemini Ink, San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center (www.geminiink.org), and the author of the full-length collections Ricochet Script (Next Page Press, April 1, 2022), Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press, 2016), and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (WordTech Communications 2010), and several chapbooks, including A Liquid Bird Inside the Night (Red Glass Books, 2015) and Dear Jean Seberg (2011), which won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest.
Her poems have been published in journals nationwide, such as The Cincinnati Review, The Texas Observer, Denver Quarterly, Great Weather for MEDIA, Washington Square, 32Poems, Tahoma Literary Review, and Sweet: A Literary Confection. Find out more about her poetry here: alexandravandekampppoet.com.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: darlene anita scott
Thursday, July 14, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-second-thursday-poetry-and-open-mic-featuring-darlene-anita-scott-tickets-350112464807
Feature darlene anita scott will be reading from her new collection, Marrow (University Press of Kentucky, 2022). Part of the New Poetry & Prose Series from University Press of Kentucky, Marrow honors those who perished in the Jonestown massacre of November 18, 1978 in the Guyanese settlement of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project led by James “Jim” Jones.
darlene anita scott is co-editor of the anthology Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared recently in Green Mountains Review, Pen + Brush, and Simple Machines.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Leticia Urieta
Thursday, June 9, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-virtual-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-leticia-urieta-tickets-328521957017
Feature Leticia Urieta (she/her/hers) is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is the author of a hybrid collection, Las Criaturas (FlowerSong Press, 2021) and a chapbook, The Monster (LibroMobile Press, 2018). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets, Lumina, The Offing, Kweli Journal, Medium, Electric Lit and others.
Urieta graduated from Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. She is a teaching artist in the greater Austin community and the Regional Program Manager of Austin Bat Cave, a literary community serving students in the Austin area, as well as the co-director of Barrio Writers Austin and Pflugerville, a free creative writing program for youth. Urieta is also a freelance writer.
Cindy Huyser hosts.
Featured Reader: Lisa Dordal
Thursday, May 12, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-virtual-poetry-reading-featuring-lisa-dordal-tickets-302471098197
Feature Lisa Dordal will be reading from her new collection, Water Lessons (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming April 2022). Dordal teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University and is also the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Robert Watson Poetry Prize, and the Betty Gabehart Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Narrative, RHINO, The Sun, The New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Greensboro Review, Ninth Letter, and CALYX. Her website is lisadordal.com.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Margo Davis
Thursday,April 14, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Register for this event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-featuring-margo-davis-tickets-275801639127
Houston poet Margo Davis reads from her newly-released chapbook, Quicksilver (FInishing Line Press, 2022). Originally from Louisiana, Davis is a three-time Pushcart nominee, and recent work has appeared in ND Quarterly, Amethyst Review, Dead Mule School of Southern Lit, Panoply, Ekphrastic Review, Deep South Magazine, Mockingheart Review, the San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle, and Ocotillo Review. Her work may also be found in a number of anthologies, including Odes and Elegies: Eco-poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press, 2020), Untameable City (Mutabilis Press, 2015), and the Texas Poetry Calendar.
Read the “virtual interview” with Margo here.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Ann Hudson
Thursday, March 10, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-featuring-ann-hudson-tickets-249960006107
BookWoman is delighted to present Ann Hudson, author of the chapbook Glow, released as the first title from Next Page Press in 2021.
Ann Hudson is also the author of The Armillary Sphere (Ohio University Press, 2006), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is a senior editor for RHINO, and teaches at a Montessori school in Evanston, Illinois.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Catch the “virtual interview” with Ann Hudson here.
Special Featured reading : Darrel Alejandro Holnes with Laurie Ann Guerrero and Hafiza Augustus Geter
Tuesday, March 8, 2022 7:00 p.m. to 8: 30 p.m.
Event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-presents-darrel-a-holnes-author-of-prize-winning-stepmotherland-tickets-254171242027
BookWoman is delighted to present an evening of poetry in celebration of the release of Darrel Alejandro Hones’ Stepmotherland (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Holnes will be joined by 2016 Texas Poet Laureate and 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner Laurie Ann Guerrero, and Hafizah Augustus Geter, author of Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) and The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin (Random House, forthcoming September 2022). Cindy Huyser hosts.
Featured Readers: Kallisto-Gaia Showcase: KB Brookins and Renée Rossi
Thursday, February 10, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-presents-kb-brookins-and-renee-rossi-tickets-230165259487
Features KB Brookins and Renée Rossi will be reading to celebrate their recently-released titles from Kallisto-Gaia Press.
KB Brookins’ chapbook, How to Identify with a Wound, was selected as the winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize from Kallisto-Gaia Press by ire’ne lara silva. KB is a Black queer nonbinary miracle: a poet, essayist, educator, and cultural worker. In addition to authoring How To Identify Yourself With A Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022), their debut full-length poetry collection, Freedom House is forthcoming in 2023 from Deep Ellum. KB is a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow and an African American Leadership Institute – Austin fellow, and has words published in Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Follow them online at @earthtokb.
Renée Rossi’s chapbook, Motherboard, was selected as runner-up in the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize contest. Rossi has published the full-length poetry collection, Triage, and two additional chapbooks: Third Worlds, and Still Life, winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize. A native of Detroit, she currently divides her time between the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and other places she finds compelling.
Special Featured Reading: Jenny Qi, Susan Nguyen, and Annelyse Gelman celebrate the release of Jenny Qi’s Focal Point
Thursday, February 3, 2022 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. CST
Event Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-presents-a-virtual-reading-with-jenny-qi-tickets-203251058387
BookWoman is delighted to celebrate the release of Jenny Qi’s Focal Point (Steel Toe Books, October 13, 2021), winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, with this evening of poetry. Jenny Qi will be joined in reading by Susan Nguyen, author of Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, September 2021), winner of the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, and Michener Center alum Annelyse Gelman, author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, 2014), the artist’s book Pool (NECK, 2020), and the EP About Repulsion (Fonograf Editions, 2019). Cindy Huyser hosts.
Featured Reader: Kai Coggin
Thursday, January 13, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-virtual-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-with-kai-coggin-tickets-206977474197
BookWoman is proud to feature Kai Coggin, whose collection of poetry, Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press, 2021), has just been released.
Kai Coggin (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Mining for Stardust and INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council and Arkansas Learning Through the Arts, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
Read the “virtual interview” with Kai here: https://cindyhuyser.wordpress.com/2022/01/06/a-virtual-interview-with-kai-coggin/
Allyson Whipple hosts; an open mic follows. Contact BookWoman (512-472-2785, bookwomanaustin@gmail.com) to order Coggin’s books for store pickup, curbside, or postal delivery.
Special Featured Reading: Launch of Tejanaland by Teresa Palomo Acosta
Friday, December 10, 2022 7:00 – 8:30 p.m. CST
BookWoman is delighted to present Teresa Palomo Acosta for the launch of her book, Tejanaland: A Writing Life in Four Acts (Texas A&M Press, 2021). Tejanaland collects three decades of Acosta’s work in poems, essays, drama, and children’s story that address the cultural, historical, political, and gender realities that have informed the author from childhood to the present.
Poet, historian, author, and activist Teresa Palomo Acosta grew up in McGregor, Texas, in a home approximately 100 human paces from the railroad tracks. She first learned about music and writing from her maternal grandfather Maximino and her mother Sabina. At 11, she decided to become a writer and spent the next four years cogitating before settling on poetry as her chosen form. Teresa’s degrees in Mexican American Studies from UT Austin and in Journalism from Columbia University reinforced her commitment to depict her Tejanaland life in equal measures of joy and pain.
In addition to Tejanaland, Acosta is the author of the poetry collections In the Season of Change (Eakin Press, 2003), Nile and Other Poems (Red Salmon Press, 1999), and Passing Time (Teresa Palomo Acosta, 1984). Acosta co-authored Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History (University of Texas Press, 2003) with Ruthe Winegarten.
Acosta will read and discuss selections from Tejanaland, which is the most recent title in Texas A&M Press’s Women in Texas History Series. sponsored by the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation for Texas Women’s History. Melissa Hield of the Ruthe Winegarten Memorial Foundation will open the evening with an introduction, and Cindy Huyser will host.
Read Cindy’s “virtual interview” with Teresa here: https://cindyhuyser.wordpress.com/2021/12/04/a-virtual-interview-with-teresa-palomo-acosta/
Featured Readers: Kelly Ann Ellis and Tina Cardona: a Celebration of the work of Glynn Monroe Irby
Thursday, December 9, 2021 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-letters-sent-inland-tickets-201375518597
BookWoman welcomes poets Tina Cardona and Kelly Ann Ellis, co-founders of the non-profit HotPoet, Inc., for an evening in celebration of Letters Sent Inland : Selected Poems of Glynn Monroe Irby.
In vivid poems that reflect Glynn Monroe Irby’s life-long connection with the Texas Gulf Coast, Letters Sent Inland explores Irby’s passionate relationship with both coastal ecology and industrial landscape. HotPoet, Inc. selected Letters Sent Inland for publication to honor Irby, who passed away in 2020. It is the first collection to be published by the organization.
HotPoet, Inc. is based in Houston, Texas. Its mission includes “creating literary arts events, publishing insightful literature, and building inclusive support networks that nurture joy as well as awareness of our obligation to care for each other and for our planet.” More information can be found at https://www.hotpoet.org/. To learn more about the journey to publishing Letters Sent Inland, be sure to read the virtual interview with Kelly and Tina.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Contact BookWoman at (512)472-2785 or bookwomanaustin@gmail.com to order your copy of Letters Sent Inland.
Featured Reader: Bree Rolfe
Thursday, October 14, 2021 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Register for this event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-virtual-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-w-bree-a-rolfe-tickets-168042019203
Bree A. Rolfe will be reading from her new collection, Who’s Going To Love the Dying Girl (Unsolicited Press, release date September 30, 2021).
Bree A. Rolfe lives in Austin, Texas, where she teaches writing and literature to the mostly reluctant, but always loveable, teenagers at James Bowie High School. She is originally form Boston, Massachusetts, where she worked as a music journalist for 10 years before she decided she wanted to dedicate her life to writing poetry and teaching. Her work has appeared in Saul Williams’s poetry anthology, Chorus: A Literary Mixtape, the Barefoot Muse anthology, Forgetting Home: Poems about Alzheimer’s, the Redpaint Hill anthology, Mother is a Verb, and 5 AM Magazine. She holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Who’s Going To Love the Dying Girl is her first chapbook. http://breerolfe.com
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows
Featured Reader: Lauren Berry
Thursday, November 11, 2021 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Register for this event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-virtual-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-w-lauren-berry-tickets-184367276487
Lauren Berry is the author of two poetry collections: C&R Press Poetry Award winner The Rented Altar (C&R Press, 2020), and National Poetry Series winner The Lifting Dress (Penguin Books, 2011), selected by Terrence Hayes. Berry received a BA in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MFA from the University of Houston where she won the Inprint Verlaine Prize and served as poetry editor for Gulf Coast. From 2009 to 2010, she held the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Agni, Silk Road, The Adroit Journal, Denver Quarterly, and Iron Horse Literary Review, and she teaches AP English Literature at YES Prep Public Schools, a charter school that provides college preparatory education to Houston’s most underserved communities. Additionally, Berry leads poetry workshops for Houston non-profits, Inprint and Grackle and Grackle. Connect with her at poetlaurenberry.com
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. And be sure to check out the virtual interview with Lauren.
Special Featured Reading: Jane Creighton and Robin Davidson
Thursday, September 30, 2021
BookWoman celebrates Jane Creighton’s newly-released collection, Bone Skid, Bone Beauty (Saint Julian Press, 2021) with poet and translator Robin Davidson.
Jane Creighton is a poet, essayist, and Professor of English at the University of Houston—Downtown, where she teaches literature and creative writing. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, she taught American literature for a year at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. In the decades prior to her university teaching, her social activism included holding organizing positions with the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In the 1970s, she edited and published an independent poetry magazine, Sailing the Road Clear, and in subsequent years taught writing in public schools for the Texas Commission on the Arts, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and Writers in the Schools. In 1987, she served as literary curator for the Washington Project on the Arts exhibition, War and Memory in the Aftermath of Vietnam.
Creighton’s publication credits include Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Poetry Foundation, Enchantment of the Ordinary, We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, Unwinding the Vietnam War, Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire, Encountering Disgrace: Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, and Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan. She is the author of an early collection of poems, Ceres in an Open Field. Originally from the northeast, she has lived in Houston for thirty-three years.
Robin Davidson is the author of two poem chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo and City that Ripens on the Tree of the World, and the collection Luminous Other, awarded the Ashland Poetry Press’s 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. Recipient of a Fulbright professorship at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and an NEA translation fellowship, Davidson is co-translator with Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska of Ewa Lipska’s poems from the Polish—The New Century (Northwestern UP, 2009) and Dear Ms. Schubert (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, Princeton UP, January 2021).
Davidson served as 2015-2017 Houston Poet Laureate under the leadership of Mayors Annise Parker and Sylvester Turner, and edited the citywide anthology, Houston’s Favorite Poems (Calypso Editions, 2018). She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019, and teaches literature and creative writing as professor emeritus of English for the University of Houston-Downtown.
Cindy Huyser hosts.
Featured Reader: Rebecca Spears
Thursday, September 9, 2021 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Register to attend this virtual event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-virtual-poetry-reading-open-mic-w-rebecca-spears-tickets-165695089473
Rebecca A. Spears is the author of Brook the Divide (Unsolicited Press, 2020), and The Bright Obvious: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Her poems, essays, and reviews have been included in TriQuarterly, Calyx, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Verse Daily, Ars Medica, Field Notes, and other journals and anthologies. She has received awards from the Taos Writers Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, and Dairy Hollow House. Brook the Divide was shortlisted for Best First Book of Poetry (Texas Institute of Letters). Spears is also a Pushcart nominee.
“The gorgeous poems in Brook the Divide reverberate with change, following the speaker through seasons of luck and loss. Along the way, Vincent van Gogh becomes an intimate mentor for the hard joy of making. We see how artists transform the world into pieces of art that then transform us: “you ablaze in my eye / and I in yours.” Throughout, Rebecca Spears’ memorable writing invites us into looking, then lingering…. What a beautifully written book.” — Sasha West
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Robin Reagler
Thursday, August 12, 2021 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Feature Robin Reagler is a poet, educator, and leader living in Houston, Texas. Over the past 22 years, she transformed Writers inthe Schools (WITS), a small grassroots organization, into a national literary movement with 40 sister programs across the US. She retired in September to focus on her own writing. Since then, she found publishers for two new books of poems. Into The The, winner of the Best Book Award, was released on March 21, World Poetry Day (Backlash Press). Night Is This Anyway, will be published by Lily Poetry Books (March 2022). Reagler is the author of Teeth & Teeth, selected by Natalie Diaz, winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize (Headmistress Press, 2018) and Dear Red Airplane (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012, 2018).
She earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. She has published poems in Ploughshares, North American Review, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, and Zocalo Public Square. Her essays have appeared in books, newspapers, and journals. The Other Mother: Letters from the Outposts of Lesbian Parenting was named best Houston parenting blog by Nickelodeon in 2009.
She has helped shape dozens of new literary organizations and has volunteered on national boards. In 2018-2019 she chaired of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Board of Trustees. Currently she is the Board Chair of LitNet, the national advocacy group representing literary organizations and publishers and Board Secretary for the equity-based Justice Hub Charter School.
This reading marks the 10th anniversary of Cindy Huyser hosting this series.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading And Open Mic
This well-attended monthly reading series is hosted by BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX), and takes place each month from 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. For the foreseeable future the event is virtual; email bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for connection information.Come out, bring your poems, and see what your poet friends have been talking about!
Featured Reader: Laura Van Prooyen
Thursday, July 8, 2021 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-with-laura-van-prooyen-tickets-158345005173
Laura Van Prooyen is author of three collections of poetry: Frances of the Wider Field (Lily Poetry Review Books), Our House Was on Fire (Ashland Poetry Press) nominated by Philip Levine and winner of the McGovern Prize and Inkblot and Altar (Pecan Grove Press). She is also co-author with Gretchen Bernabei of Text Structures from Poetry, a book of writing lessons for educators of grades 4-12 (Corwin Literacy). Van Prooyen is the Managing Editor for The Cortland Review, she teaches in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing program at Miami University and is the founder of Next Page Press: www.nextpage-press.com. She lives in San Antonio, TX. www.lauravanprooyen.com
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Christine Boldt
Thursday, June 10, 2021 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Christine H. Boldt will be reading from her inaugural poetry collection, For Every Tatter (Lamar University Press, 2021). Boldt, a retired librarian, was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nigeria in the 1960s, lived in Italy during the 1970s, and has lived in Texas for forty years. She has published in Christianity and Crisis, the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, and Working Mother. Her poetry has appeared in Christian Century, Windhover, The Texas Poetry Calendar, Bearing the Mask, Adam, Eve, and the Riders of the Apocalypse, the Poetry Society of Texas’ Book of the Year; Red River Review, Ilyia’s Honey, and Encore. Her collection Missing, One Muse: The Poetry of Sylvia St. Stevens was selected as the winner of the 2018 Alabama State Poetry Society Morris Memorial Chapbook Competition.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Lesléa Newman
Thursday, May 13, 2021 7:15 – 9:00 p.m.
Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for more information.
Feature Lesléa Newman will read from her most recent book of poetry, I Wish My Father, a memoir in verse. Newman is the author of 75 books for readers of all ages including the poetry collections Nobody’s Mother, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard, Still Life with Buddy, and the companion memoir-in-verse to I Wish My Father, I Carry My Mother. She is also the author of many children’s books including Gittel’s Journey: An Ellis Island Story, Ketzel: The Cat Who Composed, Here Is The World: A Year of Jewish Holidays, and the groundbreaking Heather Has Two Mommies. Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the National Jewish Book Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Body-of-Work Award. From 2008 – 2010, she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, MA.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. You can check out the “virtual interview” Lesléa here.
Featured Reader: Carolyn Dahl
Thursday, April 8, 2021 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. Tickets available at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/142621415493
Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for more information.
Carolyn Dahl was the winner of the “Poetry of the Plains and Prairies” chapbook competition sponsored by North Dakota State University. The press published her poems, A Muddy Kind of Love, as a limited edition, signed and numbered letterpress-printed book. Her 2019 chapbook, Art Preserves What Can’t Be Saved, won first place in the Press Women of Texas’ contest and the National Federation of Press Women’s Communications’ contest, chapbook division. She is the co-author of The Painted Door Opened with Carolyn Florek, the author of three art books, and has been published in many anthologies and literary journals. Raised in Minnesota, she now writes from Houston Texas where she raises monarch butterflies, releasing them into her garden. http://www.carolyndahlstudio.com.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: d. ellis phelps
Thursday, March 11, 2021 7:15 – 9:00 p.m.
Register for this on-line event at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-with-d-ellis-phelps-tickets-138117614503
Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for more information.
d. ellis phelps is the author of two books of poetry: what she holds(Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press, 2020) & what holds her(Main Street Rag, 2019) and of the novel, Making Room for George (MSSP, 2016). Her poems, essays, and visual art have appeared widely online and in print, and she has edited more than a dozen anthologies.
On her blog, Formidable Woman Sanctuary, she writes about spiritual and emotional healing and the writing life among other topics while also publishing the work of other writers and artists. She is the founding and managing editor of Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press and of fws: international journal of literature & art. She has taught fine arts in various venues with students of all ages for decades and she currently facilitates The Art of Writing Workshop Series for the Patrick Heath Public Library in Boerne, Texas.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Susan Morrison
Thursday, February 11, 2021 7:15 – 9:00 p.m.
Event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-featuring-susan-morrison-tickets-138114936493
Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for additional information.
Susan Signe Morrison is the editor of a recently-released chapbook, Another Troy (Finishing Line Press, 2020), containing poetry written by her mother, Joan Wehlen Morrison. Committed to bringing the lives of women hidden in the shades of history to a wider audience, she has also edited the wartime journals of Wehlen Morrison, which have been published as Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America.
A Professor of English at Texas State University, Morrison is the author of four books on the Middle Ages, as well as a novel, Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife, which retells the story of the Old English epic Beowulf from the perspective of the female characters. A broader audience has accessed Susan’s work through interviews with Wired, American Public Media, the History Channel, and The New Yorker.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Loretta Diane Walker
Thursday, January 14, 2021 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information; on-line event registration available via Evenbrite (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-virtual-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-tickets-135623037155)
Feature Loretta Diane Walker is the author of five collections of poetry, and her sixth collection, Day Begins When Darkness is in Full Bloom, is forthcoming in 2021. Her most recent title is Ode to My Mother’s Voice (Lamar University Press, 2019). Her third collection, In This House (Bluelight Press, 2015), won the 2016 Phyllis Wheatley Book Award. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, a nine-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee, she is not only an award winning poet but a musician who plays her tenor saxophone sometimes, a daughter navigating a new world, a teacher who still likes her students, a two-time breast cancer survivor, and an artist who has been humbled and inspired by a collection of remarkable people. Of her work, Naomi Shihab Nye writes, “Loretta Diane Walker writes with compassionate wisdom and insight—her poems restore humanity.” Be sure to read the virtual interview with Loretta.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Ann Howells
Thursday, December 10, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.
Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey for eighteen years both in print and online. Her books include: Under a Lone Star (Village Books Press), Cattlemen & Cadillacs as editor (Dallas Poets Community Press), So Long As We Speak Their Names (Kelsay Books), and Painting the Pinwheel Sky (Assure Press). Her four chapbooks include: Black Crow in Flight, published through Main Street Rag’s 2007 competition and Softly Beating Wings was the 2017 William D. Barney Competition winner from Poetry Society of Texas (Blackbead Books). Ann gets involved in poetry whenever she has a chance, attending festivals, belonging to several workshop groups, and offering her services as contest judge when asked. She’s even won a couple local contests. Her work appears in many small press and university journals. She has received seven Pushcart nominations and one Best of the Net nomination.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Rachelle Toarmino
Thursday, November 12, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.
Rachelle Toarmino is a writer, editor, and educator from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag, and is the author of the chapbooks Feel Royal (b l u s h, 2019) and Personal & Generic (PressBoardPress, 2016). Her poems and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Shabby Doll House, Sundress Publications, The Wanderer, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She will be an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst in the fall. *That Ex *is her first full-length collection.
Praise for That Ex:
Rachelle Toarmino’s That Ex is the poetry book all your ex-boyfriends warned you was crazy. These poems are somewhere between aphorism, dm, and good old-fashioned free verse. This is a sensitive, self-aware collection full of Britney Spears references, emotional vulnerability, and digital nostalgia. Funny, tender, and real. –Hera Lindsay Bird, author of Hera Lindsay Bird.
Check out the “virtual interview” with Rachelle here. Allyson Whipple hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Jill Alexander Essbaum
Thursday, October 8, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.
Feature Jill Alexander Essbaum is the award-winning author of several collections of poetry including Heaven, Harlot, Necropolis, and the single-poem chapbook The Devastation. Her new collection, Would-Land, is just out from Cooper Dillon Books. Her first novel Hausfrau debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List and has been translated into 26 languages. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals including Poetry, The Christian Century, Image, and The Rumpus, as well as multiple Best American Poetry anthologies. A two-time NEA fellow, Jill is a core faculty member in The Low Residency MFA Program at University of California-Palm Desert. She lives in Austin, Texas. Twitter: @JAEssbaum
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Liliana Valenzuela
Thursday, September 10, 2020 7:15 – 9:00) p.m. Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.
Liliana Valenzuela is the author of Codex of Journeys: Bendito Camino (Mouthfeel Press, 2013) and several artisan chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in Edinburgh Review, Indiana Review, Tigertail, Huizache, Borderlands, Drunken Boat, and other publications. She has received writing awards and recognition from Luz Bilingual Publishing, Austin International Poetry Festival, Drunken Boat, Indiana Review, Austin Poetry Society, and the Chicano/Latino Literary Award, and has held residencies at Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and Vermont Studio Center.
An acclaimed translator of U.S. Latinx writers Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, Dagoberto Gilb, Cristina García, and others, Valenzuela was a guest of honor at the Congreso de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española in Córdoba, Argentina, in 2018. An inaugural CantoMundo fellow and a long-time Macondo Writers Workshop member, she writes poetry, essays, journalism, and is currently working on a memoir. She is the former editor of ¡Ahora Sí!, the Spanish publication of the Austin American-Statesman and is now a staff translator for Aparicio Publishing. A native of Mexico City, Valenzuela lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Praise for Codex of Love
These are poems sin el qué dirán, sin censura, sin vergüenza, uncensored, unbuttoned, unapologetic, swimming desnuda between the many worlds women inhabit, blazing of sulphur and volcanoes, wrapped in corn husks and banana leaves, somersaulting between here and allá, and that fertile womb in between. —Sandra Cisneros
[Valenzuela] takes all readers, no matter how many languages they speak, on a journey that is “an act of faith/a leap into the unknown,” and one that readers will enjoy immensely. —Celeste Guzmán Mendoza, author of Beneath the Halo and CantoMundo co-founder
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Christopher Manes
Thursday, August 13, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. –Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.
Christopher Lee Manes is the author of the newly-released poetry collection Naming the Leper, (LSU Press, 2020). He is a poet, scholar, and educator, and his work has appeared in Louisiana History, the Southwestern Review, Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America, and Think Global Health, an online publication of the Council of Foreign Relations. Manes is a Lecturer I Rhetoric instructor at the University of Texas at Dallas and teaches History at Richland College, where is primary role is Response to Intervention Coordinator for Richland Collegiate High School, a charter school of Dallas County Community College District at Richland College. He lives in Dallas, Texas.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. You can read the “virtual interview” with Christopher Manes here.
Christopher Lee Manes (credit: David Taffet)
Featured Reader: David Meischen
Thursday, July 9, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. — Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.
Feature David Meischen has been honored by a Pushcart Prize for “How to Shoot at Someone Who Outdrew You,” a chapter of his memoir, originally published in The Gettysburg Review and available in Pushcart Prize XLII. Anyone’s Son, David’s debut poetry collection, is new from 3: A Taos Press. A lifelong storyteller, he received the 2017 Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters. Storylandia, Issue 34, currently available, is entirely devoted to David’s fiction: The Distance Between Here and Elsewhere: Three Stories. David has a novel in stories and a short story collection; he is actively seeking an agent and/or publisher for both. He has served as a juror for the Kimmel Harding Nelson center for the arts; in the fall of 2018, he completed a writing residency at Jentel Arts. Co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press, David lives in Albuquerque, NM, with his husband—also his co-publisher and co-editor—Scott Wiggerman.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Zoom connection info available from bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com.
Don’t forget to check out the “virtual interview” with David!
David Meischen (credit: Scott Wiggerman)
Featured Reader: Susan J. Rogers
Thursday, June 11, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. — Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.
Susan J. Rogers’ poetry weaves the personal with mythic tales, including those of Goddesses from Tibet to the British Isles. Rogers, a choir director and musician who has lived near Chicago’s Lake Michigan, in New Mexico’s desert, and in South Central Texas, draws metaphor from these landscapes.
Rogers’ first poetry collection, In the Beginning: an Egg, a Mask, a Woman, was published in 2018 and contains illustrations by her partner, artist Luisa-Maria Potter. Other recent publication credits include the di-vêrseˊ-city anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival, and the anthology Enchantment of the Ordinary (Mutabilis Press, 2018). Rogers has been interviewed about her poetry on Texas Nafas, a poetry-centered public access television program, and her musical compositions (with poems as lyrics) have been performed at the University of New Mexico and at Chicago State University.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Read the “virtual interview” with Susan J. Rogers here.
Virtual Event – Nicole Brogdon and Juliana Maldonado
Thursday, May 14, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. — Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.
Juliana Maldonado and Nicole Brogdon will be our features for this virtual event.
Juliana Maldonado is a poet who found her voice through Book Woman and the wonderful Cindy Huyser’s open mics. She is ever striving to celebrate her mixed Chicana heritage and all things that make her soul sing. She is published in the ACC literary periodical The Rio Review and has featured at Malvern’s I Scream Social. She can only be found in person, so listen while you can! And here’s her “virtual interview.”
Nicole Brogdon is a therapist and a writer living in Austin Texas. She graduated from Rice University with honors and earned an MA in creative writing from the University of Houston on a Barthelme writing fellowship. For fifteen years she worked as a writer in the schools, as adjunct English faculty at Houston Community College, and as a free-lance editor and writer.
Later she acquired a Masters in counseling from St Edward’s University. Currently she
works as a psychotherapist (a Licensed Professional Counselor, as well as a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist), specializing in trauma, attachment, creativity, and multicultural issues. She has worked with all kinds of admirable strugglers, from torture survivors to musicians to couples.
Married for 28 years to an Iranian doctor, the two have a grown daughter. Nicole likes poetry, sudden fiction, live music, and making objects with her hands. Nicole believes that her lifelong work has been connected under the umbrella of helping
people to tell their stories. As one of her favorite poets, William Matthews, wrote:
There’s no truth about your childhood, though there’s a story, yours to tend, like a fire or garden. Make it a good one, since you’ll have to live it out, and all its revisions, so long as you all shall live....
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Virtual Event
Thursday, April 9, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. on Zoom–Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.
Koraly Dimitriadis is a Cypriot-Australian writer and actor. She is the author of the Australian poetry bestseller Love and F–k Poems and the recent Just Give Me The Pills, which together form the basis for her theatre show “Saying The Wrong Things”. Koraly also makes short films of her poems. She is a freelance opinion writer and has also been published in The Washington Post. Koraly was awarded the UNESCO City of Literature Residency in Krakow in 2019 to work on her debut fiction novel, Divided Island. Much of her work has to do with cultural and religious repression. www.koralydimitriadis.com
And you can check out the virtual interview with Koraly here!
Featured Reader: Sequoia Maner
Thursday, February 13, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Sequoia Maner is a poet and Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University. She is coeditor of the book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, January 2020). Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in venues such as The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review and elsewhere. Her poem “upon reading the autopsy of Sandra Bland” was a finalist for the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize and she is at work on a critical manuscript about the history of African American Elegy. And here’s the virtual interview.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Patty Crane
Thursday, March 12, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Patty Crane’s collection Bell I Wake To is just out from Zone 3 Press. Crane’s book-length poem, something flown, was winner of the 2017 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. Her poetry and her translations of Swedish Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer have appeared in numerous journals, including Bellevue Literary Review,VerseDaily, West Branch, American Poetry Review, Blackbird, and The New York Times. Bright Scythe, a bilingual volume of her translations, was published by Sarabande Books in 2015.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Michelle Iskra
Thursday, January 9, 2020 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Michelle Iskra earned an M. A. in English Literature from Texas State University and has taught English at both Austin Community College and Cedar Park High school for sixteen years. She’s a writer, painter, educational consultant, researcher, and lover of cats. And her “virtual interview” is here.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Readers: ire’ne lara silva and Natalia Treviño
Thursday, December 12, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
ire’ne lara silva is the author of three poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, and CUICACALLI/House of Song, and a short story collection, flesh to bone which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldúa Milagro Award. ire’ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci. Website: irenelarasilva.wordpress.com
Born in Mexico, Natalia Treviño is the author of the chapbook, VirginX, which was a finalist for the open chapbook contest with Finishing Line press. A professor of English at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, she was raised in a Spanish speaking household and learned English from Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie. Her awards include the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the San Antonio Arts Foundation Literary Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize for Poetry, the Menada Literary Award at the Ditet E Naimit (Dee-tet EH Nah-ee-mit) Poetry Festival in Macedonia, and several others. Her first book, Lavando La Dirty Laundry, was a national and international awards finalist. Natalia’s poems appear in Bordersenses, Borderlands, The Taos Journal of Poetry and Art, and other journals and anthologies.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Nicole Cortichiato
Thursday, November 14, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Poet, playwright and children’s book author Nicole Cortichiato will be our feature.
Nicole Cortichiato is a writer with narcolepsy who resides on the edge of consciousness. You’ll find her napping in unusual places and making a creative life of joy and service despite her disability. She’s published numerous poems, plays, and children’s stories that blend fiction with reality and dark humor with optimism. Her short play “Fries” was featured in TILT Performance Group’s production of “Flip Side Redux.” She also won 2nd place in Austin Film Festival’s First Three Pages Live competition for her TV script “How to Grow a Man.” If you attend an open mic in Austin, chances are you will see Nicole perform. She’s been featured at Malvern Books’ I Scream Social and Writer’s Roulette, NeWorlDeli’s Poetry Night, and the One Page Salon with Owen Egerton. On the side she is also a member of the band Nicole and Eric’s Guide to a Meaningful Life in which she plays theremin and gives life advice. She lives in Austin with her partner and two demanding corgis.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Viktoria Valenzuela
Thursday, October 10, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Viktoria Valenzuela is a creative nonfiction poet human rights activist whose work appears in such publications as Poetry Bay, Mutha Magazine, AMP (Hofstra University), The MALCS Journal, and A Prince Tribute Anthology: I Only Wanted One Time to See You Laughing. Valenzuela is an educator, a Macondista and the organizer of 100 Thousand Poets for Change: San Antonio, Texas. Her writing keeps keen focus on Chicana mothering as decolonization and political action. Valenzuela and poet Vincent Cooper have six children and live on the Westside of San Antonio.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Gabrielle Langley
Thursday, September 12, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Poet Gabrielle Langley will be our feature. Langley has been featured in the Huffington Post and the Houston Chronicle as one of Houston’s important emerging poets. With work appearing in a variety of literary journals in the United States, and in Europe, she was the featured poet for Houston Poetry Fest 2017, a recipient of the Lorene Pouncey Award, the Vivian Nellis Memorial Award for Creative Writing, and an ARTlines national poetry finalist. Ms. Langley works during the day as a licensed mental health professional. To safeguard her own mental health, she writes poetry and dances Argentine tango at night. Her first book of poetry, Azaleas on Fire, was released in March of this year.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Robin Carstensen
Thursday, August 8, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Robin Carstensen’s chapbook, In the Temple of Shining Mercy received the annual first-place award by Iron Horse Literary Press in 2016, and published in 2017. Poems are also published in BorderSenses, Southern Humanities Review, Voices de La Luna, Demeter Press’s anthology, Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland, and many more. She directs the creative writing program at Texas A&M University-CC where she is the senior editor for The Windward Review: literary journal of the South Texas Coastal Bend, and is co-founding, senior editor of the Switchgrass Review: literary journal of health and transformation in partnership with the Coastal Bend Wellness Medical Center.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Susan Niz
Thursday, July 11, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Feature Susan Niz’s first poetry chapbook is Beyond this Amniotic Dream (Beard Poetry, Minneapolis, 2016). She has a second chapbook, Left-Handed Like a Lightning Whelk, forthcoming with Finishing Line Press (November 2019). Her short work has appeared in Wanderlust Journal, The Write Launch, Chaleur Magazine, Typishly, Tipton Poetry Journal, Carnival Literary Magazine, Crack the Spine, Blue Bonnet Review, Two Words For, Belleville Park Pages, Ginosko, Cezanne’s Carrot, Flashquake, Opium Magazine, and Summerset Review. She has been featured in live poetry shows in Minneapolis. Susan writes across genres. Her novel Kara, Lost (North Star Press, 2011) was a finalist for a Midwest Book Award (MIPA) for Literary Fiction. She has a Master’s Degree in Education, raises kids, has been a grassroots community organizer, and conserves Monarchs. She recently relocated from Minnesota (having survived the Polar Vortex last winter) to the Austin area where she will delve into new creative and literary projects and enjoy the sun and warmth.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
And here’s the virtual interview with Susan.
Feature: The Poetry of Liberation
Thursday, June 13, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Tonight’s reading will feature the poetry of liberation, in celebration of Pride Month. Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: K. F Anthony
Thursday, May 9, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Poet, editor, educator, and life coach K. F. Anthony will be our feature.
K. F. Anthony’s love for writing began in childhood. The author of the collection Circling, her work has also appeared in the Di-Verse-City anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival, as well as in various print and on-line editorial platforms. Anthony’s debut short poetry film, “Breath of Faith,” was selected for the 2018 Capital City Black Film Festival.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Lucy Griffith
Thursday, April 11, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Poet and editor Lucy Griffith will be our feature.
Happiest on a tractor named Mabel (a muse of 55 horsepower) Lucy Griffith lives on a ranch beside the Guadalupe River near Comfort, Texas. As a poet and essayist, she has work in Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems and Weaving the Terrain: 100-word Poems of the Southwest. She is co-editor of Echoes of the Cordillera: Attitudes and Latitudes Along the Great Divide, an ekphrastic anthology. She was a contributor at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in 2018. Her new collection, We Make a Tiny Herd, has just been released by Main Street Rag Press.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Abriel Louise Young and Lilli Hime
Thursday, March 14, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Abriel Louise Young and Lilli Hime will be our features.
Lilli Hime is an undergraduate at St. Edward’s University, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English Writing. She has served on the submission review board for the school’s award winning creative arts journal, Sorin Oak Review, for two years. She believes art is the bedrock for empathy and understanding, and seeks to utilize it for social change by creating spaces where lesser heard voices can be heard. Her work stems from her identity as an immigrant, a woman of color, a member of the LGBTQ community, and a fellow person.
Abe Louise Young is a poet and social justice activist. Her work appears widely in journals such as The Nation, Narrative, Feminist Wire, Witness, New Letters, Massachusetts Review and others. She holds degrees from Smith College, Northwestern University and the University of Texas at Austin, where she was awarded a James A. Michener Fellowship from the Michener Center for Writers. She’s the author of three chapbooks of poetry, including the just released “Poem for a Friend Growing Lighter and Lighter” from Dancing Girl Press.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured: A Feast of Valentines
Thursday, February 14, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
To celebrate the holiday, we are crowd sourcing our featured reading. Bring published poems to share that address the subject of love in its many manifestations, including comic, ironic, tragic, and of course erotic expressions. And be sure to bring some of your own work for the open mic.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Kristy Peloquin
Thursday, January 10, 2019 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Kristy Peloquin is a poet, memoirist, teacher, and writing group leader in Austin, TX. She has an MFA in poetry, teaches writing at Austin Community College, and co-leads therapeutic creative writing workshops for persons suffering through grief and loss. Her recent book of poetry “Adrift” explores trauma and the after effects it can produce.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Amanda Johnston
Thursday, December 13, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Feature Amanda Johnston earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter (Argus House Press). Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry, Kinfolks Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, Pluck!, No, Dear and the anthologies, Small Batch, Full, di-ver-city, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism.
The recipient of multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, she is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. Johnston is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, a cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding executive director of Torch Literary Arts. She serves on the Cave Canem Foundation board of directors and currently lives in Texas.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Annelyse Gelman
Thursday, November 8, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Feature Annelyse Gelman’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Indiana Review, BOMB, Verse Daily, and elsewhere, and she is the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (2014), a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. She was the inaugural poet-in-residence at UCSD’s Brain Observatory, and has received support from the Academy of American Poets and New Zealand Pacific Studio. She was a 2016-17 Fulbright grantee in Berlin for her work at the intersection of poetry, music, and film, and currently holds a fellowship at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Laura Van Prooyen
Thursday, October 11, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Laura Van Prooyen is author of two collections of poetry, Our House Was on Fire (Ashland Poetry Press 2015) nominated by Philip Levine and winner of the McGovern Prize and Inkblot and Altar (Pecan Grove Press 2006). Her poems also have appeared in APR, Boston Review, Ploughshares and Prairie Schooner, among others. Van Prooyen teaches in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing program at Miami University, and she lives in San Antonio, TX.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Lisa Dordal
Thursday, September 13, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Lisa Dordal lives in Nashville, Tennessee and teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University. Her first full-length collection of poetry—Mosaic of the Dark—will out from Black Lawrence Press in January 2018.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Dylan Krieger
Thursday, August 9, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Poet Dylan Krieger of Baton Rouge will be our feature. Krieger is the author of the newly-released collections dreamland trash, no ledge left to love, and Giving Godhead (Delete Press, 2017), which the New York Times Book Review said “will be the best collection of poetry to appear in English in 2017.”
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured: The Poetry of Deborah A. Akers
Thursday, July 12, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Deborah A. “Deb” Akers, who founded the BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry
Reading series, left an indelible mark on the literary scene in Austin.
She worked on the staff of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review for a number
of years, and was the long-time editor of the Austin International Poetry
Festival Youth Anthology. Tonight’s featured reading will be from Deb
Akers’ work, including selections from her posthumously-published
collection, “An Elegant Sufficiency.”
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Jim LaVilla-Havelin
Thursday, June 14, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Jim LaVilla-Havelin of San Antonio will be our feature. LaVilla-Havelin is an educator, arts administrator, community arts advocate, consultant, critic and poet. His fifth book of poems, WEST, POEMS OF A PLACE was just published by Wings Press. LaVilla-Havelin is the Poetry Editor for the San Antonio Express-News and the Coordinator for National Poetry Month in San Antonio.
LaVilla-Havelin retired in 2013 after seventeen years as the Director of the Young Artist Programs at the Southwest School of Art, to write, teach, and consult. He teaches Creative Writing in the Go Arts Program of Bihl Haus Art, in the Writers in Communities program at Gemini Ink, where he teaches at the Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center, and in the BFA program at the Southwest School of Art, where he teaches The Image of the Artist in Literature and Cinema.
He has offered workshops, classes, and public programs for the McNay, San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio Independent School District, Georgetown Poetry Festival, Gemini Ink, and many other sites . He lives in Lytle, Texas, (the “place”,of “poems of a place” with his wife, artist, Lucia LaVilla-Havelin.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Check out the virtual interview with Jim here.
Featured Reader: Deborah Bogen
Thursday, May 10, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Featured poet Deborah Bogen’s four books of poems are In Case of Sudden Free Fall, Jacar Press Poetry Prize, 2017, Let Me Open You a Swan, Elixir Press Antivenom Prize 2009, Landscape With Silos, National Poetry Series Finalist and XJ Kennedy Poetry Prize winner 2005, and Living by the Children’s Cemetery, ByLine Press Chapbook winner 2002.
She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, teaching occasionally, playing ukulele in the Highland Park Mini Band and writing lots of prose poems for a new manuscript, Selfies.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Cyrus Cassells
Thursday, April 12, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Feature Cyrus Cassells is the author of six books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, The Crossed-Out Swastika , and The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, just published in the Crab Orchard Poetry Series (SIU Press). Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. He is a professor of English at Texas State University and lives in Austin.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. And you’ll find his “virtual interview” here.
Featured Reader: Katrinka Moore
Thursday, March 8, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Feature Katrinka Moore comes from a long line of Texans. She grew up in Brazoria County and now lives in New York. A former choreographer and dancer, she is a lyric and visual poet.
Her poems appear in Dos Gatos Press’ Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems; Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair: Best of the Texas Poetry Calendar; and Milkweed Editions’ Stories from Where We Live: The Gulf Coast.
She is the author of Numa, Thief, and This is Not a Story, winner of the New Women’s Voices prize. Her latest book, Wayfarers, is a collection of poems that are tales told by multiple narrators.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
And here’s a link the the “virtual interview” with all three editors of Red Sky.
Featured Readers: The Poets of Red Sky
Thursday, February 8, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Please join us for a reading featuring the poets of Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women. This anthology, edited by Melissa Hassard, Gabrielle Langley, and Stacy Nigliazzo, was born as a response to the murder of Houston nurse Caroline Minjares as a vehicle for making the voices of victims of violence heard. Readers for the evening will be contributors E. Kristin Anderson, Dr. Katherine Durham Oldmixon Garza, and Dr. Andrea Witzke Slot, and editors Gabrielle Langley and Stacy Nigliazzo.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Leticia Urieta
Thursday, January 11, 2018 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Our feature, poet Leticia Urieta, is a proud Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She works as a teaching artist in the Austin community. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets Anthology, BorderSenses, Lumina, The Offing and others. She has recently completed her first mixed genre collection of poetry and prose and is currently at work completing her novel that tells the story of a Mexican soldadera caught up in the march to Texas during Texas’ war with Mexico.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Christia Madacsi Hoffman
Thursday, December 14, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Poet Christia Madacsi Hoffman will be our feature. Hoffman grew up along the banks of the Mystic River in Mystic, Connecticut. A longtime Austin, Texas resident, Hoffman’s work has appeared in the Texas Observer and the annual anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival. Through her company, CenterLight Media, Hoffman works as a marketing and editorial writer, graphic designer, and actor. Her early career adventures included antique furniture restoration and leading treks in the high Himalaya. You can check out a virtual interview with Hoffman here.
J. Scott Brownlee
Thursday, November 9, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Scott Brownlee is a poet-of-place from Llano, Texas and a former Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU, where he taught poetry to undergraduates and fifth graders through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. His poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Hayden?s Ferry Review, West Branch, Prairie Schooner, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbooks Highway or Belief, Ascension, and On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County. Honors for these collections include the 2013 Button Poetry Prize, 2014 Robert Phillips Poetry Prize, and 2015 Tree Light Books Prize. His first full-length collection, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and 2015 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award and selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison
Poetry Prize. It also won the 2016 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Brownlee writes about the people and landscape of rural Texas and is a founding member of The Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes the aesthetically marginalized working class. He currently lives in Austin, Texas and teaches for Brooklyn Poets as a core faculty member.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Readers: Huston-Tillotson Showcase
Thursday, October 12, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
This vibrant Huston-Tillotson University Showcase features poets Katherine Durham Oldmixon, Jennine “DOC” Wright, Ryan Sharp, and fiction writer Mike Hart. Katherine Durham Oldmixon is Professor and Chair of English at Huston-Tillotson University, and the author of a chapbook, Water Signs; she also co-directs the Poetry at Round Top Festival and is a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Jennine “DOC” Wright holds four Slam titles, and is an MFA student at Spalding University. Ryan Sharp is the Coordinator of Huston-Tillotson University’s Writers’ Studio, and editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review; he is also the author of the chapbook my imaginary old man: poems (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Fiction writer Mike Hart is an Assistant Professor of English/Communications at Huston-Tillotson University. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Southwestern Review, The Southern Review, The Southern Anthology, and The Greensboro Review.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Sarah Cortez
Thursday, September 14, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Houston Poet Sarah Cortez will be our feature. Cortez is a Councilor of the Texas Institute of Letters and Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and has poems, essays, book reviews, and short stories anthologized and published in journals such as Texas Monthly, Rattle, The Sun, Pennsylvania English, Texas Review, Louisiana Literature, Arcadia, Langdon Review of the Arts, The Midwest Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature. Her debut poetry collection, How to Undress a Cop, won the PEN Texas Literary Award. Her books have placed as finalists in the Writers’ League of Texas awards, Los Angeles Book Festival Awards, and the PEN Southwest Poetry Awards. An anthologist of eight volumes, she has won the Southwest Book Award of the Year, multiple International Latino Book Awards, Border Region Librarians Assn. Award, Press Women of Texas Editing Award, and the Skipping Stones International Honor Award. Her most recent anthology, Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials, has already been named a 2016 Southwest Book of the Year and won the prestigious First Place in Editing from the National Federation of Press Women. She is both a Houston and Texas finalist for poet laureate.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Jason Edwards
Thursday, August 10, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Poet Jason Edwards will be our feature. In 1997 Jason joined the Dallas Slam Team and the next year he and his team got the first perfect score for a group piece in slam history, then went on to win second place in the 1998 National Poetry Slam in a performance described by Time Magazine described as “triumphant.” Jason moved to Austin in 2000 and that summer went on a national tour as part of “SlamAmerica.” In 2001 Jason formed with Ragan Fox “TriggerHappyJacks”, a gay performance troupe combining poetry, performance art, theater and comedy.
At the peak of what was becoming a promising artistic career, Jason’s life unraveled when he lost his trans-sister in a tragic car accident at the same time as he had begun to experience the symptoms of schizophrenia. Jason stopped spoken word altogether for many years. Through the years, he went through many different combinations of medicated states as he struggled with his illness. When he finally found the right combination, he began to write again and to blossom as a writer.
In 2011 he recorded an album with his partner, though he shared it only with a select few friends. In May of 2015, Jason was asked to be featured as part of the 20th Anniversary of the Austin Slam, and performed in front of his peers for the first time in over a decade, bringing the house to tears and silence. Last summer, he had the honor of opening up for the U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Jonathan Moody
Thursday, July 14, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Cave Canum fellow Jonathan Moody will be our feature. Moody is the author of The Doomy Poems (Six Gallery Press, 2012) and Olympic Butter Gold, which won the 2014 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. Moody holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, and his poetry has appeared in various publications such as African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Borderlands, Boston Review, The Common, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Harvard Review Online. He lives in Fresno, Texas, with his wife and son and teaches English at Pearland High School.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Griselda Castillo
Thursday, June 9, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Griselda Castillo is an unapologetically bilingual poet and creative nonfiction writer from Laredo, Texas. The youngest daughter of Mexican immigrants, she is a first-generation American and explores her Mexican-American heritage and identity in much of her work. Her poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Spark + Blink, Unlikely Strangers, Chachalaca Review, and the di-vers-city anthology.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Martha K. Grant
Thursday, May 12, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Martha K. Grant is the author of A Curse on the Fairest Joys (Aldrich Press), poetry
that explores the wounds of childhood and the grace of healing. Her work has been
published in Borderlands, New Texas, Earth’s Daughters, The Yes! Book, the
anthologies Red Sky: Poems about the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women and
Unruly Catholic Women Writers, and nine editions of the Texas Poetry Calendar . She
has a Pushcart nomination and received an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. A
visual artist and a sixth generation Texan, she has a home and studio in the Hill
Country northwest of San Antonio.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Readers: Agnes Eva Savich and Jan Benson
Thursday, April 13, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Come out for an evening of poetry by literary haiku poets Jan Benson and Agnes Eva Savich.
Jan Benson is an award-winning haiku poet living in Fort Worth, and her work
has appeared in translation in several foreign languages. Her haiku have been published in many of the world’s leading haiku journals and magazines as well as regionally in “form poetry” magazines. In 2016, she won or placed in three international haiku contests. She s a member of Poetry Society of Texas and The British Haiku Society, and can be reached at wordsmythwmn@yahoo.com .
Agnes Eva Savich lives in Pflugerville with her husband, two kids, & four cats. She has been writing poetry since she was 12 and haiku for over a decade. She has over 100 haiku published in literary journals such as Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and Acorn, has been translated into 5 languages, and has placed in international haiku contests. She has an early collection of poetry, The Watcher: Poems (Cedar Leaf Press, 2009) and a first haiku collection in the works.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Readers: Michelle Hartman and Ann Howells
Thursday, March 10, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Poets Michelle Hartman and Ann Howells, both of the DFW area, will be our features.
Michelle Hartman is the editor of Red River Review and author of three collections of poetry: Disenchanted And Disgruntled (Lamar University Press, 2013), Irony and Irreverence (Lamar University Press, 2015), and, in 2017, The Lost Journal of My Second Trip to Purgatory (Old Seventy Creek Press). Her work has been featured in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and appears in such journals as Slipstream, Plainsongs, Carve, Crannog, Poetry Quarterly, The Pedestal Magazine, Raleigh Review, San Pedro River Review, Concho River Review and RiverSedge.
Ann Howells is editor of the Dallas Poetry Community’s literary magazine Illya’s Honey and author of Under a Lone Star (Village Books Press, 2016), chapbooks Black Crow In Flight (Main Street Rag Publishing), The Rosebud Diaries (Willet Press), and Letters for My Daughter (Flutter Press). She is also the editor of Cattlemen & Cadillacs, an anthology of D/FW poets. Her poems appear both domestically and internationally, and she has four Pushcart nominations.
This promises to be a terrific evening! Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Readers: Desiree Morales and Ashley Smith Keyfitz
Thursday,February 9, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Austin poets Desiree Morales and Ashley Smith Keyfitz will be our features.
Desiree Morales is a poet and educator whose work has been featured in the
forest dRIVE, Truck, and Conflict of Interest. She grew up in Southern
California and lives in Austin, Texas.
Ashley Smith Keyfitz is the author of various chapbooks & the forthcoming
collection Park of Unwired Asking from Xexoxial Editions (2017). She was a
founding editor of the press Little Red Leaves & lives in Austin where
steps on many legos, ferments anything, and designs websites for the
government.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Join us! And be sure to check out the virtual interviews with Desiree and Ashley!
Featured Reader: Kimberly Lambright
Thursday, January 12, 2017 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Kimberly Lambright’s debut poetry collection, Ultra-Cabin, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, and was published October 2016. She is a MacDowell fellow, and her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Wicked Alice, The Burnside Review, Bone Bouquet, Columbia Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, and The Boiler. She holds an MA in humanities from NYU and an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University. She lives in Austin and is at work on her second book: Doom Glove.
Don’t forget to check out the “virtual interview” with Kimberly!
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Join us for a great reading to start off the new year.
Featured Reader: Sasha West
Thursday, December 8, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Feature Sasha West’s first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, was a winner of the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Forklift Ohio, Third Coast, American Poet, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellowship, a Houston Arts Alliance grant, Pushcart nominations, and Inprint’s Verlaine Prize. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Be sure to bring poems for the open mic! And be sure to check out Cindy’s “virtual interview” with Sasha.
Featured Reader: Cindy St. John
Thursday, November 9, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Austin poet Cindy St. John, author of the newly-released collection Dream Vacation (published by H_NGM_N Books), will be our feature. St. John is also the author of four chapbooks. She lives in Austin, TX, where she teaches at a public school.
You can check out the “virtual interview” with Cindy here.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Reader: Loueva Smith
Thursday, October 13, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Feature Loueva Smith is the winner of the 2015 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize, awarded by Texas Review Press. Her poems have been published in such journals as DoubleTake and the Louisiana Review, and anthologized in Goodbye, Mexico, Untamable City, The Weight Of Addition, and TimeSlice.
Her poetry has been painted into nude watercolors by Cookie Wells for the artist’s 2015 show, Body Language, at Archway Gallery in Houston, Texas. Loueva Smith presented a reading of her poems at the opening, and Lydia Hance interpreted the poems through dance, unaccompanied by music.
Her poetry is spoken as narration in Shamed, a dance film by Frame Dance Production, choreographed by Lydia Hance. Her poetry was also presented in a dance performance by jhon stronks called Purging Honey at Rice University.
Her play Tenderina was staged at Frenetic Theater in Houston, Texas.
She is the author of The Book Of Wool And Fur, a hand-made fur-covered collection of love poems.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows.
Featured Readers: Usha Akella and Varsha Saraiya-Shah
Thursday, September 8, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Usha Akella is founder of the Poetry Caravan in Greenberg/White Plains New York and in Austin, Texas, and the author of three poetry collections: Kali Dances and So Do I, A Face that Does Not Bear the Footprints of the World and, most recently, Rosary of Latitudes. In 2012, she scripted and produced her first musical: Ek, An English Musical on the Life of Shirdi Sai Baba. She has performed her poetry on stages across the world, and Festival Director of MATWAALA, South Asian Poets Fest, in Austin, TX.
Photographer and poet Varsha Saraiya-Shah’s debut poetry collection, Voices, is slated for publication in July, 2016. Her work has recently appeared in Right Hand Pointing, and in Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (Mutabilis Press, 2015). She lives in Houston, Texas.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic! And check out the virtual interviews of Usha and Varsha.
Featured Reader: Valentine Pierce
Thursday, August 11, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
“This is not the quiet tap of civilized literature; this is the loud, raw truth of life.” Valentine Pierce, author of Geometry of the Heart, comes to BookWoman from New Orleans to perform her poetry. Pierce is a spoken word artist, graphic designer and artisan. She has performed in a variety of events from poetry to plays to one-woman shows. She has produced shows with musicians, poets, dancers, drummers and lyricists. Hailing from has performed and been published throughout the U.S.
Pierce’s poetry has been developed into visual art display (“The Geometry of Life”) and choreographed by the Newcomb College for Women dance department for the inauguration of Tulane University’s president (“Rivers of My Soul”). Guaranteed to be a memorable evening.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
Featured Reader: Loretta Diane Walker
Thursday, July 14, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Loretta Diane Walker is a 3-time Pushcart nominee. She has published three collections of poetry, including Word Ghetto, which won the 2011 Blue Light Press Book Award, and In This House, released by Blue Light Press in 2015. Loretta was recently named “Statesman in the Arts” by the Heritage Council of Odessa. Walker’s work has appeared in numerous publications, most recently Her Texas, Texas Poetry Calendar 2015, Pushing Out the Boat International Journal, San Pedro River Review, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, Diversity: Austin International Poetry Festival, Boundless Poetry: Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival, Pushing the Envelope: Epistolary Poems, Perception Literary Magazine, Connecticut River Review, The Texas Poetry Calendar 2016, The Houston Poetry Festival, Siblings: Our First Macrocosm, and is fort coming in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas.
Loretta is a member of the Poetry Society of Texas, Pennsylvania Poetry Society, The National Federation of State Poetry Societies and Delta Sigma Theta, Inc. She teaches music in Odessa, Texas. Loretta received a BME from Texas Tech University and earned a MA from The University of Texas of the Permian Basin. http://lorettadianewalker.weebly.com/.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic! And be sure to read the virtual interview with Loretta.
Featured Reader: Liza Wolff Francis
Thursday, June 9, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Liza Wolff-Francis is a feminist poet and writer with an M.F.A. in Creative
Writing from Goddard College. She was co-director for the 2014 Austin
International Poetry Festival and a member of the 2008 Albuquerque Poetry
Slam Team. She has an ekphrastic poem posted in Austin’s Blanton Art Museum
by El Anatsui’s sculpture “Seepage” and her work has most recently appeared
in Poetry Pacific, Edge, Twenty, Border Senses, Di-verse-city anthology of
the Austin International Poetry Festival, and on various blogs. She has a
chapbook out called Language of Crossing (2015, Swimming with Elephant
Publications), which is a collection of poems about the Mexico- U.S.
border. Every day she eats both popcorn and dark chocolate and she
currently lives in Albuquerque, NM.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
Featured Reader: Anis Shivani
Thursday, May 12, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Anis Shivani is the author of several critically acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, including Anatolia and Other Stories (2009), Against the Workshop (2011), The Fifth Lash and Other Stories (2012), My Tranquil War and Other Poems (2012), Karachi Raj: A Novel (2015), Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish: Poems (2015), and Soraya: Sonnets (2016). Both Anatolia and Other Stories and The Fifth Lash and Other Stories were longlisted for the Frank O’Connor international short story award. Books forthcoming in 2016 include Both Sides of he Divide: Observing the Sublime and the Mundane in Contemporary Writing, Literature in an Age of Globalization, A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less, and The Moon Blooms in Occupied Hours: Poems. Books in progress or recently finished include Death is a Festival: Poems, Plastic Realism: Neoliberalism in Recent American Fiction, and the novels Abruzzi, 1936 and An Idiot’s Guide to America.
Anis’s work appears in the Yale Review, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Iowa Review, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Fence, Epoch, Boulevard, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, Verse, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, New Letters, Subtropics, Times Literary Supplement, London Magazine, Meanjin, Fiddlehead, and other journals. His criticism appears widely in newspapers and magazines such as Salon, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Texas Observer, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Austin American-Statesman, Kansas City Star, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, Charlotte Observer, and other outlets.
Anis is the winner of a 2012 Pushcart Prize, graduated from Harvard College, and lives in Houston, Texas.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
Featured Reader: W. Joe Hoppe
Thursday, April 14, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Joe Hoppe has taught at Austin Community College since 1996. He has published two books of poetry, Galvanized, by Dalton Publications in 2007, and Diamond Plate by OBSOLETE! press in 2012, as well as many self-published chapbooks. He also hosts the monthly W. Joe’s Poetry Corner at Malvern Books. Most recently he has been working very hard (and with a lot of help) to get his hotrod ’51 Plymouth on a ’90 Dakota frame with a 60’s-era 318 engine on the road. Check out the virtual interview with Joe here.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
Featured Reader: Melissa Studdard
Thursday, March 10, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Melissa Studdard is host of VIDA Voices & Views, an editor for American Microreviews and Interviews, and a judge for the monthly Goodreads ¡Poetry! Group contest. She is also the author of the novel, Six Weeks to Yehidah, a poetry collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, and a collection of interviews, The Tiferet Talk Interviews. Her awards include the Forward National Literature Award and the International Book Award, among others. Her poetry, fiction, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Poets & Writers, Tupelo Quarterly, Psychology Today, Pleiades, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day. Of her debut poetry collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, Robert Pinsky writes, “This poet’s ardent, winning ebullience echoes that of God…” and Cate Marvin says her work “would have no doubt pleased Neruda’s taste for the alchemic impurity of poetry.” Learn more at www.melissastuddard.com.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic! And check out the virtual interview.
Featured Readers: Sarah Frances Moran and Jenuine Poetess
Thursday, February 11, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Sarah Frances Moran is a writer, editor, animal lover, videogamer, queer Latina. She thinks Chihuahuas should rule the world and prefers their company to people 90% of the time. She was born and raised in Houston, Texas. Writing for her came out of a desire to help others and has evolved into full blown insistence on changing the world. Her aim is to poetically fight for love and harness the type of tender violence needed to push love forward. She strongly believes that words have immeasurable power.
She is the founder/editor of Yellow Chair Review whose inaugural issue is out in June 2015. Her work has most recently been published or is upcoming in FreezeRay Poetry, Thank You For Swallowing, Drunk Monkeys, Rust+Moth, Maudlin House, Blackheart Magazine, Red Fez and The Bitchin’ Kitsch. Her chapbook I Am A Terrorist is forthcoming with Dark Heart Press.
Her work is equal parts frustration, hope, anger, advocacy and love. At the heart of it, she’s a stick-a-love-poem-in-your-back-pocket kind of poet. She’s a huge advocate for animal welfare and works daily to combat pet overpopulation. Spay and neuter your pets, people. She resides in Waco, Texas with her partner and their small menagerie of small 4-legged critters. You can read more about Sarah in her own words in Virtual Interview.
Jenuine Poetess has poemed her way through California and Texas since 2009. She is the founder of ITWOW International and Waco Poets Society. Jenuine’s work has been included in such publications as di-verse-city AIPF Anthology 2013, Yellow Chair Review, and The Feminist Wire; her poem, “Colors I have Been” will be published in the forthcoming anthology Coiled Serpent set to be released at AWP2016 by Tia Chucha Press. Rooted in the conviction that creative health is a matter of justice, Jenuine creates weird things and ponders artful ways to continue disrupting the homeostasis… check out the virtual interview here.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
Featured Reader: Debra Winegarten
Thursday, January 14, 2016 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Debra L. Winegarten is a poet, biographer, and publisher, and is on the faculty of South University. A sociologist by training, Debra is a past president of the Texas Jewish Historical Society. She has written two Jewish-themed poetry books, There’s Jews in Texas?, winner of Poetica Magazine’s 2011 Chapbook Contest, and Where Jewish Grandmothers Come From.
Debra’s biographies include Oveta Culp Hobby: Colonel, Cabinet Member, Philanthropist (University of Texas Press, 2014) and Katherine Stinson: the Flying Schoolgirl (Eakin Press, 2000). Oveta Culp Hobby has received a gold medal from the Military Writers Society of America as well as the 2015 award for best Biography from the Texas Association of Authors, and was a literary award finalist for the WILLA award from Women Writing the West. Katherine Stinson was a finalist for Foreword Magazine’s “Book of the Year” award in the Biography category.
Debra is currently working on an adult biography, Zvi Yaniv: From the Mysterious Island to Nanotechnology, and a biography of two Texas women. Meeting God at Midnight by Ahuva Batya Scharff, the first poetry collection published by Debra’s publishing company, Sociosights Press, received the 2015 Best Poetry Book award from the Texas Association of Authors. Sociosights Press be publishing its first children’s book, Almost a Minyan, in 2016.
Check out the virtual interview with Debra here.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
Featured Readers: Louise Gail Richardson and Laura Guli
Thursday, December 10, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Louise Richardson is a native Austinite and a 1971 graduate of Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State) with a BA in History. She is a playwright, poet and novelist. Her comedy “Hamlet the Dane” received a full production at Capital City Playhouse in Austin in 1991. Her musical “Chanteuse” was produced at the Silver Spur Theater in Salado in 2011 and at the City Theatre and Daugherty Arts Center in Austin in 2012, with its music winning a 2011 ASCAPlus Award. The CD “Songs from Chanteuse” is available at BookWoman. She has had poems published in “Mermaid Tales” in 2013 and “Dog and Cat Tales” in 2014 through Tablerock Poets in Salado. Louise has hosted poetry and music open mics at Maria’s Taco Xpress and Recycled Reads in Austin and co-hosts the Star Coffee Open Mic in Round Rock. Her works can be found in books at Amazon.com, music at Reverbnation.com, and videos on her YouTube Snardfluk Channel. Check out the virtual interview with Louise here.
Laura Guli is a poet-psychologist who lives in Austin, TX. Laura graduated from the University of Virginia, where she majored in English, and later earned a Doctorate in School Psychology from University of Texas at Austin. Her chapbook, A Fiery Grace (2010), was a finalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices competition. Laura’s poetry has been in several literary journals including Kalliope, Lilliput Review, Heliotrope, Plainsongs, Potomac Review and Offerings. In addition to poetry, Laura has published a drama-based social skills curriculum for children (Social Competence Intervention Program, Research Press, 2008). She is also currently writing a musical for children and families. Read more about Laura in her virtual interview.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
Featured Reader: Ken Fontenot
Thursday, November 12, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Poet and novelist Ken Fontenot is our feature. His most recent book of poetry, Just a Trace of Moon: Selected Poems from 2006 – 2013, was published in 2015 by Pinyon Publishing. He is the author of the novel For Mr. Raindrinker which has been reissued by Alamo Bay Press in 2015. His poetry collection In a Kingdom of Birds won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for best book of poetry in Texas in 2012. Fontenot has published his own poetry and poetry in translation in number of journals, including Borderlands; Texas Poetry Review. Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
You can read the Virtual Interview with Ken here.
Featured Reader: Logen Cure
Thursday, October 8 , 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Logen Cure is a poet and teacher. She is the author of three chapbooks: Still (Finishing Line Press 2015); Letters to Petrarch (Unicorn Press 2015); and In Keeping (Unicorn Press 2008). Her work also appears in Word Riot, Radar Poetry, IndieFeed: Performance Poetry, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives in Dallas-Fort Worth with her wife. Learn more at www.logencure.com. And check out the virtual interview with Logen here.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
Featured Reader: Cheney Crow
Thursday, September 10, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Poet, linguist and sculptor Cheney Crow began writing as a young girl in Washington DC. She earned her BA at Sarah Lawrence College, and in 2014 she completed her MFA in poetry at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, The hiatus between arts degrees included more than a decade in Europe, a PhD in Applied Linguistics, and many years of teaching at UT. In the last year Cheney’s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, the online journal Human Equity through Art (HEART), the arts magazine Terminus, and Tupelo Quarterly, where her poem was a semifinalist in theTQ7 contest, and will be included in the anthology Best of Tupelo Quarterly. Her ekphrastic poem “Execution at the Temple” was selected for honorable mention in the 2014 Maine Media Character Contest. Last fall Cheney gave a workshop called “Claiming Collective Wisdom” at the Austin Feminist Poetry Festival. This year one of her poems will join Cindy Huyser’s in Dos Gatos Press’ Texas Poetry Calendar.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic! And don’t forget to check out the virtual interview with Cheney.
Featured Reader: Kaye Voigt Abikhaled
Thursday, August 13, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Poet Kaye Voigt Abikhaled, is the author of Club des Poètes (2004); Lyrics of Lebanon (2006); Childhood in the Third Reich: WW II and Its Aftermath (2000 and a second edition in 2006). A bilingual edition in German and English, translated by the author, was also published in 2006. She is a member of the Austin Poetry Society (APS) since 1985, member of the Poetry Society of Texas (PST) since 1987 and of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (NFSPS). She was named Life Member of PST in 2013. Born in Berlin, Germany, she immigrated to the U.S. in 1960. Her poems have been published in English and translations in German, in state, national and international poetry journals. She was the editor of A Galaxy of Verse from 1999-2004, chaired the Poetry in Schools project for the Poetry Society of Texas and was appointed Counselor for the Austin area of the Poetry Society of Texas in 2003. Her poetry was named First Runner Up of The Fernando Rielo World Prize for Mystical Poetry in Madrid, Spain in 2000 and Finalist in 2008.
Allyson Whipple will guest host. An open mic follows — bring your poems! And check out the interview with Kaye.
Featured Reader: Victoria Garcia-Zapata Klein
Thursday, July 9, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX
Our feature, Victoria Garcia-Zapata Klein, is a poet from San Antonio’s west side. She’s the author of 3 collections of poetry, Peace in the Corazon for which she won the Premio Poesia Tejana, & Another Water Bug is Murdered While it Rains in Texas. Her latest book, Te Prometo, debuted February 2015. Her work is in the anthologies, This Promiscuous Light, Cantos al Sexto
Sol and Penguin Press’s first Latina collection ¡Floricanto Si¡. She has been featured in The Express News, The Current, Backbeat Magazine, The Texas Observer and NPR. She lives and writes in San Antonio’s Art Deco District with her family.
Cindy Huyser hosts. An open mic follows — bring your poems!
Featured Reader: Ire’ne Lara Silva
Thursday, June 11, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
ire’ne lara silva lives in Austin, TX, and is the author of two chapbooks: ani’mal and INDíGENA. Her first collection of poetry, furia, was published by Mouthfeel Press in 2010 and received an Honorable Mention for the 2011 International Latino Book Award in Poetry. Her first collection of short stories, flesh to bone, was published by Aunt Lute Press in 2013. ire’ne is the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldua Milagro Award, a Macondo Workshop member, and a CantoMundo Inaugural Fellow. She and Moises S. L. Lara are currently co-coordinators for the Flor De Nopal Literary Festival.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Bring your poems! And check out the virtual interview with ire’ne.
Featured Reader: Susan Rooke
Thursday, May 14, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Susan Rooke writes poetry and fiction, and has had dozens of mainstream and fantasy poems published in both print and online publications. Most recently her work has appeared in Concho River Review, Naugatuck River Review, Red Weather, Kentucky Review, The Avalon Literary Review, inkscrawl, and the anthologies Pushing the Envelope: Epistolary Poems (ed. Jonas Zdanys, Lamar University Press 2015), and Twice Upon a Time (Kind of a Hurricane Press 2015).
A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee, she also had her poem “All Hallows” (which first appeared in Melancholy Hyperbole) featured for Halloween on “Freshly Pressed” (WordPress.com). Her writing career began much longer ago than she would care to admit with a contest-winning fantasy short story in The Twilight Zone Magazine. She hopes to publish her fantasy novel The Space Between in the coming year. And this time she means it.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Bring your poems!
And don’t forget to check out the virtual interview with Susan.
April, 2015 – Austin International Poetry Festival
As it turns out, the opening night for the Austin International Poetry Festival fell on our 2nd Thursday. Rather than compete with AIPF’s activities, we decided to take a “bye” for the month of April.
Featured Reader: Joe Jimenez
Thursday, March 12, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Featured poet Joe Jiménez is the 2012 recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Poetry Prize and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Jiménez is the author of The Possibilities of Mud (Korima Press 2014) and A Silver Homebody Flicka Illuminates the San Juan Courts at Dawn, the recipient of the 2011 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. He lives in San Antonio, Texas. For more information, visit joejimenez.net.
Check out the virtual interview with Joe Jiménez here.
Cindy Huyser hosts; an open mic follows. Bring your poems!
Featured Readers: Sarah Hackley and A. R. Rogers
Thursday, February 12, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Tonight’s features are two up-and-coming poets who have recently released their first chapbooks.
Sarah Hackley is the author of Preparing to Fly, a personal finance book for women leaving abusive partners, Finding Happiness with Migraines: A Do It Yourself Guide, and the Amazon women’s poetry bestseller The Things We Lose. Her poetry also has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including the The Bridges of America: Homeless Poetry Anthology, YARN, Rawboned, Crucible, and the Austin Younger Poets Award Anthology, and on the walls of the Umlauf Sculpture Garden. She is currently at work on her first novel.
A. R. Rogers’ debut chapbook, tiny nothing, was released in the fall of 2014 by Raw Paw Press.
Cindy Huyser hosts. Bring your poems for the open mic!
Featured Reader: Donna Snyder
Thursday, January 8, 2015 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Donna Snyder publishes work in literary journals and anthologies throughout the United States and on-line, and has presented readings in Sitka, Alaska, Venice and Santa Monica, California, Boston, New York City, Denver, and throughout New Mexico and Texas. Her book reviews appear in Red Fez, the El Paso Times, and other venues. She is a contributing editor to Return to Mago, an international webzine which since 2012 has featured a continuing series of her poems based on the divine feminine principle and the role of women in world culture. Her poetry is featured monthly in VEXT Magazine, a webzine of international art and literature.
Virgo Gray Press released her chapbook, I Am South, in 2010, which was resissued in 2014. Also in 2014, Chimbarazu Press released Poemas ante el Catalfaco: Grief and Renewal. In 2015, NeoPoiesis Press will publish her book Three Sides of the Same Moon. She is working on a poetry collection for Slough Press.
Snyder’s work as an activist lawyer advocating on behalf of indigenous people, immigrant workers, and people with disabilities has garnered multiple prizes and recognitions. She founded the Tumblewords Project in 1995, and continues to coordinate its free weekly workshops and other events.
Cindy Huyser hosts. An open mic follows – bring your poems!
Read the virtual interview with Donna Snyder.
Featured Reader: David Meischen
Thursday, December 11, 2014 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Poet and fiction writer David Meischen will be our feature. David Meishen has been a poet and poetry teacher for thirty years. He has had poems in The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, and other journals, as well as Two Southwests (Virtual Artists Collective, 2008), which showcased poetry from the Southwest of China and the United States. Meischen has participated in four collaborative poetry and art shows, most recently Ekphrasis: Sacred Stories of the Southwest (Phoenix, AZ, Obliq Art, 2014). Meischen has recent fiction in The Gettysburg Review, Bellingham Review, The Evansville Review, and elsewhere. Winner of the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest in Mainstream Fiction, 2011, and the Talking Writing Fiction Contest, 2012, he has finished a novel in stories. Meischen is a co-founder and Managing Editor of Dos Gatos Press; he lives in Austin, TX, with his husband-also his co-publisher and co-editor-Scott Wiggerman.
Cindy Huyser hosts. An open mic follows – bring your poems!
Read the interview with David Meischen here.
Featured reader: Natalia Treviño
Thursday, November 13, 2014 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Born in Mexico City, Natalia grew up in a Texas where her mother taught her Spanish and Bert and Ernie gave her lessons in English. Natalia has won several awards for her poetry and fiction including the 2004 Alfredo Moral de Cisneros Award, the 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2012 Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio.
Her first book of poetry, Lavando La Dirty Laundry, is available from Mongrel Empire Press and most online bookstores.
A member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Natalia has been working to increase young adult literacy since 1992 in her teaching career and through programs sponsored by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, Gemini Ink, and the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center.
You can read a virtual interview with Natalia Treviño here.
Braided Stream — Janice R. Campbell and Toni Falls
Thursday, October 9, 2014 6:45 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Come early to enjoy Braided Stream, an hour-long collaborative poetry performance, followed by an open mic and book signing.
6:45 p.m. — Renée Suaste on guitar
7:15 – 8:15 – Braided Stream
8:15 – 8:45 – open mic
8:45 Book signing
Janice Rebecca Campbell is a poet, artist, photographer, and graphic designer. Janice is the author of two books of poetry, pink merrymaking allowed in the midst of green geometry and A Disturbance in the Field: Collected Poems 1971–2013, and co-author of Braided Stream: A Poetry Duet, a collaborative performance and book with poet Toni Heringer Falls. One reader describes her poetry as “events from ordinary life distilled into meaningful, beautiful poetry—the poems are often quiet yet can pack a surprising punch.”
Toni Heringer Falls graduated from Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX) with a BS in elementary education and from St. Mary’s University (San Antonio, TX) with a MA in counseling. She is a retired teacher, psychotherapist, and an inactive Licensed Professional Counselor. Formerly from Jonesboro, Arkansas, she now lives in San Antonio with her husband and an ill-mannered dog. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and publications including The Dreamcatcher, San Antonio Express-News, Sustaining Abundant Life, Texas Poetry Calendar, Voices Along the River, and Voices de la Luna. The poem “Gift” won first place in the San Antonio Poetry Fair, 2010.
Check out the interview with Janice and Toni.
BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic with Vasilina Orlova
Thursday, September 11, 2014 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar #A-105, Austin, TX)
Feature Vasilina Orlova is the author of Contemporary Bestiary (Gutenberg Printing Press Independent Group, Austin, 2014). Born in the village of Dunnai in the Russian Far East in 1979, she has lived in Vladivostok, Moscow, and London, and is now based in Austin, Texas. She holds a PhD in Philosophy. and is the author of seven novels in Russian, including The Voice of Fine Stillness, the Wilderness, and The Supper of a Praying Mantis. She has also received several Russian literary awards, including the Anton Delvig Prize laureate for her poetry book Barefoot (2008).
Writing and publishing in English since 2012, her poetry and prose have been translated into English, French, Spanish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and Russian.
Check out Cindy Huyser’s interview with Vasilina Orlova here.
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