Essentially Poetic: An Essential Voices Monthly Reading Series for Community Building, February 2024
Join FlowerSong Press at our next installment of Essentially Poetic Reading Series on Wednesday, February 28, 2024 at 7:00 PM CST via Zoom.
Essentially Poetic: An Essential Voices Monthly Reading Series for Community Building is a curation of poets, artists, essayists, novelists, educators, and everyday individuals whose deemed their voice essential, their work necessary, and their compassion for community building contagious and inspiring. This space is free of judgement and hate, and is a space for writers, readers, and admirers to come together to listen and uplift one another in a creative, poetic, and intentional online space.
Essentially Poetic is dedicated to amplifying essential voices throughout our world. By creating an online environment, we can reach beyond geographical borders and barriers. The essential voice echoes loud and translates intuitively. Join us each month as we come together to celebrate featured readers and artists and listen to their poetic and essential voice.
Our February Essentially Poetic Featured Readers:
Donna Spruijt-Metz’s debut poetry collection is ‘General Release from the Beginning of the World’ (2023, Free Verse Editions, Palette Press). She is an emeritus psychology professor, MacDowell fellow, rabbinical school drop-out, and former classical flutist. She was featured as one of ‘5 over 50 debut authors’ in Poets & Writers Magazine (11/23). Her chapbooks include ‘Slippery Surfaces’, ‘And Haunt the World’ (with Flower Conroy). and ‘Dear Ghost’ (winner, 2023 Harbor Review Editor’s prize). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, Tahoma Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a reader for Psaltery & Lyre magazine and co-stewards the national Poetry Grind.
Denise Tolan teaches, lives, and writes in San Antonio Texas. Her work has been included in places such as The Penn Review, Atlas and Alice, Lunch Ticket, and The Best Small Fictions. Denise was a finalist for Best of the Net 2022 and the International Literary Awards: Penelope Niven Prize in Nonfiction. She has a memoir, Italian Blood, which was released in October 2023.
Peter J. Harris, Altadena Poet Laureate Editor in Chief (2022-2024) and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow (2023-2024), is the author of Safe Arms: 20 Love & Erotic Poems (w/an Ooh Baby Baby moan), with Spanish translations by Francisco Letelier (FlowerSong Press), and SongAgain (Beyond Baroque Books). In 2015, his book of poetry, Bless the Ashes (Tia Chucha Press), won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and his book of personal essays, The Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My 'Unalienable Right,' won the American Book Award. Harris is founding director of The Black Man of Happiness Project, a creative, intellectual, and artistic exploration of Black men and joy. He writes the blog WREAKING HAPPINESS: A Joyful Living Journal: www.inspirationcrib.com.
Harris is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC and was the 2018 Los Angeles COLA Fellow in literary arts. His 1993 book, Hand Me My Griot Clothes: The Autobiography of Junior Baby, which featured a philosophical elder Black man ruminating on life, love, and ethics, earned the PEN Oakland award for multicultural literature. He is Founding Publisher/Editor of the LA magazine, The Drumming Between Us: Black Love & Erotic Poetry, (1994 to 1999) and Genetic Dancers: The Magazine for and about the Artistry within African/American Fathers (1984 to 1988). He’s the former Producer/Host of Inspiration House: VoiceMusic for Whole Living, a weekly radio show on KPFK-FM Los Angeles featuring poets in studio reading their work to recorded music (1999 to 2004). Since the 1970s, Harris has published his work in a wide variety of publications, including Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, edited by Suzanne Lummis; Altadena Poetry Anthologies for 2018 and 2019; and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts in Los Angeles, edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Daniel A. Olivas, and Ruben J. Rodriguez. Since 1992, Harris has been a member of the Anansi Writers Workshop at the World Stage, in LA’s Leimert Park..
Photo Credit: Anne Kim / Courtesy of The Nicholson Project
Ernesto M. Garay is the author of a poetry collection, Reverberating Voices. His writings have also appeared in the DI-VȇrRSέ-City Anthology 2020, Redwood Writers 2016 Poetry Anthology, Pterodáctilo, and Ethnic Studies Journal. Garay is LA Revista Bilingüe: La Voz's Person of the Month in Sonoma County for March 2020, a 2019-2020 Sonoma County, California, Discovered Award Recipient in Literary Arts. Today, Garay works as an Ethnic Faculty at Sierra College and is the proud father of Pakal. He lives with him in Davis, California.
We look forward to our next reading and hope you will join us in community building through poetry and creative expression!
