Click flyer for larger versionAs many of you know, I'm John Burroughs, a.k.a. Jesus Crisis, of the monthly Lix and Kix Poetry Extravaganza in Lakewood. Though that series is still going strong, I'm thrilled to announce that beginning on Sunday November 7th I will also be hosting an open mic and featured poet series in my hometown of Elyria, Ohio (the Lorain County seat).
This new series will take place every Sunday afternoon from 1 to 3 p.m. at the newly reopened Jim's Coffeehouse and Diner, located at 2 Kerstetter Way (formerly known as Lake Avenue) in downtown Elyria, just doors away from the gorgeous East Falls Riverwalk. The current plan is that each session will begin promptly at 1 with an open mic before the features. When the weather's nice we may continue outdoors near the falls with a poetry free-for-all after the coffeehouse closes at 3.
Featured poets/authors/performers lined-up already include:
Nov. 7 - Eric Anderson and Stacie Leatherman
Nov. 14 - J.E. Stanley and dan smith
Nov. 21 - Sammy Greenspan and Tom Adams
Nov. 28 - Elise Geither and Lady K Smith
Dec. 5 - Claire McMahon and Lou Suarez
Dec. 12 - Dianne Borsenik and Mary Turzillo
Dec. 19 - Steven Smith and Courtenay Roberts
Dec. 26 - Cameron Conaway and Clarissa Jakobsons
Jan. 2 - Shelley Chernin and Anne McMillen
Jan. 9 - Andrew Rihn and Christina Brooks
Jan. 16 - Wendy Shaffer and Eric Odum
Jan. 23 - Michael Bernstein and Michael Grover
Jan. 30 - Yuyutsu Sharma, Geoffrey Landis and Bonné de Blas
Feb. 2nd thru 8th - Snoetry: A World Record Winter Wordfest
Feb. 13 - Everyone's a feature - open mic free-for-all
Feb. 20 - Dawn Shimp and a very special guest
Feb. 27 - Paula Lambert and Louise Robertson
I will add more features to the list in the very near future as soon as I have time to sort things out and get back to everybody who's inquired. Feel free to contact me at jc@crisischronicles.com for more information/details.
http://www.facebook.com/loraincountypoets
http://twitter.com/elyriapoetry
Just one set of falls on the Black River in Elyria, Ohio*
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About November 7th's featured poets:
Eric Anderson lives with his family in Elyria, Ohio. His "A Couple of Scars on My Back" recently earned a Lantern Award for best poem. His Confederate Season won the 2002 Lorain County Community College chapbook competition. And his novella, Isn't That Just Like You? (published by Cleveland State University Press) won the inaugural Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Contest in 2007.
Stacie Leatherman's first collection of poems, Stranger Air, will be published by Mayapple Press in early 2011. Work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in New American Writing, Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Diagram and Crazyhorse, among others. She has an MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Please note, I've added more featured poets to the schedule. To see a photo/blurb from our Nov. 7th event in the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram click here.
About Nov. 14th's featured poets:
J.E. Stanley is an accountant and part-time guitarist from the grayscale suburban wilderness of Northeast Ohio and a member of the deep cleveland tribe of poetry, as well as the author of Dark Intervals (vanZeno Press), Dissonance (deep cleveland press) and Ink (Gypsy Lips Press). He is also co-author, with Joshua Gage, of Intrinsic Night (Sam's Dot Publishing). Follow his blog at http://jestanley.blogspot.com/
dan smith, also a member of the deep cleveland tribe of poetry, is the neo-Beat mystic author of Crooked River (deep cleveland press) and winner of the 2009 Hessler Street Fair Anthology Poetry Contest. He has been known to come with music. See selections of his poetry at http://www.deepcleveland.com/f-mysticdansmith.html
Please note I've added several new featured poets to the list, including a couple of Cleveland Poetics: The Blog contributors.
I wasn't planning to have a feature at all on the day after Christmas, but changed my mind after finding out Cameron Conaway would be passing through town on his way to Thailand, where he'll live the next couple of years. This will be his first Cleveland area reading and his last for some time.
From my blog:
Richard Hearn, half of the fantastic poetry/music duo Trenchcoat Manifesto, has suffered a bad finger break and will be unable to perform this Sunday during PoetryElyria at Jim's Coffeehouse and Diner. We wish Richard much love, a speedy healing, and we hope to reschedule TM as soon as possible in 2011.
Meanwhile, his fab creative partner and the other half of Trenchcoat Manifesto, poet Tom (Waits for know one) Adams will deliver a rare and striking solo set for your listening and experiential pleasure. Pudding House Salon Goddess (and poet) Sammy Greenspan (author of the just published Greatest Hits from Pudding House and the Greenspan who made me forget about Alan) will spin her sometimes surreal and always superb poetic magic as well. And weaving between Tom and Sammy during PoetryElyria as an unprecedented surprise will be infamous (or is that unfamous?) performance artist The Top Less Poet. The TLP promises his/her breasts will remain family friendly during this Sunday's performance. But he/she's also been known to lie.
Join PoetryElyria in rare form this Sunday (11/21/2010) from 1 to 3 p.m. at Jim's Coffeehouse and Diner, 2 Kerstetter Way, in Elyria, Ohio.
November 28th's featured authors are Elise Geither and Lady K Smith.
Elise Geither is a northeast Ohio playwright whose works (including The Poet's Box and Prom for Angel) have been produced across the country. Mom to three kids, she teaches at Baldwin Wallace and recently earned her PhD with an Urban Ed/ESL focus. She works with charities including Love Without Boundaries and Fill This House (Cleveland). Her book Horse Latitudes: Monolog...ues for Women was published by deep cleveland press.
Lady K is a poet, web designer, collage artist, photographer and videographer based in Cleveland, Ohio. Founder and editor of The City Poetry Press and art zine, she has created and disseminated art in diverse places including London, Croatia, Morocco, and Mexico. She recently instigated a successful Poets for the Homeless project. Follow Lady and her husband Smith's cosmic adventures at walkingthinice.com and visit The City at thecitypoetry.com
December 5th's featured poets during PoetryElyria are Lou Suarez and Claire McMahon.
Lou Suarez is the author of two book-length collections of poetry, Traveler (2010) and Ask (2004), both published by Mid-List Press (Minneapolis), and three poetry chapbooks, Losses of Moment, The Grape Painter and On U. S. 6 to Providence. He is professor emeritus at Lorain County Community College and lives in Sheffield Lake, Ohio, with his wife Debby.
Claire McMahon has an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University (Boulder, Colorado) and a Ph.D. in 20th Cent. American & British Poetry from Kent State University. She is co-editor of MoonLit poetry journal (Drag City Press, Chicago) and the author of a book of poems entitled, Emergency Contact (Van Zeno Press, Cleveland). She has taught English writing courses locally at Lake Erie College, Baldwin-Wallace College, Cuyahoga Community College, and Chancellor University. Currently, Claire is an Adjunct Professor of Humanities at Bowling Green University’s Firelands campus.
This week, Jim's will stay open later. Following the poetry, two live bands will perform beginning at 3 p.m. to celebrate the lighting of nearby Ely Square for the holidays.
Courtenay Roberts lives in Cleveland Heights, OH where she works as a barista in Phoenix Coffee's Lee Road Café. When she is not supplying the neighborhood’s coffee habit she is most likely reading her latest find from the local used bookshop or laughing at her own very unfunny jokes.
She began writing in college on accident. After figuring out that life as a p...rofessional dancer meant very little ice cream, she turned to the only other thing that had been with her since early childhood, books. She has been searching for a practical use for her degree in English ever since.
Before she dies she hopes to dance across the stage at Carnegie Hall, write the ever elusive great American...something, cook one legendary meal for the people she loves most, and to have gotten dirt from all seven continents beneath her fingernails.
Steven B. Smith is a poet, memoirist, photographer, blogger and collage/assemblage artist who makes his home in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, OH. He's been writing poetry for nearly five decades. For more than twenty years he published the famed ArtCrimes journal. He created a massive online art/poetry archive at http://agentofchaos.com/. And a wide array of his poetry and collages have been published in the critically acclaimed book Zen Over Zero: Selected Poems 1964-2008. Smith and his wife Lady have traveled the world extensively, creating and living art in places like Croatia, Morocco and Mexico, while blogging about the best, worst and most unique bits of their journey at http://walkingthinice.com/. They've also collaborated on a book about Smith's life entitled “Criminal – a true story of armed robbery, stolen cars, alternative art, mainstream poetry, underground publishing, robbing the cradle, and leaving the country.” For more information on Smith, you may read his mutant bio at http://www.agentofchaos.com/bio.php.
January 2nd's featured poets are Shelley Chernin and Anne McMillen:
Shelley's bio: Shelley Chernin is a freelance researcher, writer, and editor of legal reference books who writes poetry to maintain her insanity. Her poems have appeared in Scrivener Creative Review, Rhapsoidia, What I Knew Before I Knew: Poems from the Pudding House Salon - Cleveland, the Heights Observer, and the 2010 Hessler Street Fair Anthology. The Akron Art Museum awarded her Honorable Mentions in its New Words Poetry Contest in 2009 and 2010. She recently moved from eastern Cuyahoga to Lorain County, where she's enjoying the measurement of snowfall in inches rather than feet.
Anne's bio: My full name is Anne McMillen, I'm 29 and was born in Elyria Ohio. I went to college for several semesters at LCCC and then on to Bowling Green State University until I dropped out to focus on writing. During those years I traveled the U.S. and eventually moved to San Francisco for 5 years. My first published work was at unlikelystories.org when I was 18 years old. I currently have five published books of poems and am working on my first full length novel. My writing focuses on the dysfunctional home life I endured as well as the sociological problems and issues I observe daily. For a living I work as an optician in a welfare clinic and help people who are disadvantaged obtain a better quality of life. I'm queer and unconventional and reside now in Cleveland with my partners whom I love dearly and care for immensely. I spend a lot of time doing outreach with young queers, organizing speakers and entertainment from out of state to come and spread the good word. Right now my life is better than it ever has been and coming from extreme poverty I consider myself a success even if financially I'm not much better off than I was as a child, but I have a very rich life filled with love, friends and a great community.
January 9th's featured poets are Christina Brooks and Andrew Rihn:
A self described "Scholarly Vegetarian Atheist Radical Socialist Feminist Pacifist Childfree Poet," Andrew Rihn is the author of several slim volumes of poetry, including "Outside the Clinic" (Unlikely Stories) and "The Rust Belt MRI" (Pudding House). He lives in Canton, Ohio. For more, follow his Midwestern Sex Talk blog at http://arihn.wordpress.com/
Christina Brooks is a native of Detroit and splits her time between southeastern Michigan and northern Ohio. Co-editor of Mnemosyne literary journal, she has shared her writing at several venues in Detroit, Michigan, Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, and Marion, Ohio. For more, see http://www.myspace.com/runewarrior1
January 16th's featured poets are Wendy Shaffer and Eric "Verb" Odum.
About Wendy (stolen from her website, http://wendyshaffer.com/): Wendy Shaffer is a gratefully recovering poet who lives in the city of Cleveland amid firecrackers, roosters, boom boxes, gunshots, small children with muddy little hands & feet, her brother, Marian, 17 cats & 2 dogs. She likes animals. She has a BFA in writing from Carnegie Mellon University & an... MFA in the same from Bowling Green State University. Shaffer's poetry blog, house of cats, features many Cleveland poets.
About Verb: Eric Odum is a 20 year old poet who attended Cleveland School of the Arts as a Drama/Creative Writing major. He started to write at the age of 9 after an English teacher assigned him a haiku to write, after that it never ended. In freshman year Eric went on to compete at something called SlamU run by Playhouse Square...sure he didn't make it the first 2 years, but for the last 3 he was part of the national youth slam poetry team that went on to compete at Brave New Voices. Eric runs a poetry group called New Age Poets, as well as a performance poetry group called Spit Poet Spit. Website: http://verbsnotebook.wordpress.com
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