Essentially Poetic: An Essential Voices Monthly Reading Series for Community Building, June 2025
Join us for our next installment of Essentially Poetic: An Essential Voices Reading Series for Community Building on Tuesday, June 17, 2025 at 7:00 PM CST on Zoom
Essentially Poetic: An Essential Voices Reading Series 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.
Meet our June Essentially Poetic Featured Readers:
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF (Stalking Horse Press), When Trying to Return Home (Counterpoint Press), Kinds of Grace (Flowersong Press), and Neon Steel (Cornerstone Press). She is fiction editor at Pleiades, seasonal faculty at Yale Writers’ Workshop, and an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri--Kansas City.
Megha Sood (she/her) is an award-winning Asian-American author, poet, editor, curator, and literary activist from New Jersey. A Literary Partner with “Life in Quarantine” at Stanford University, she has received fellowships and support from the National League of American Pen Women, VONA, Kundiman, Dodge Foundation, Sundress, Pen Women, and Martha Vineyard Creative Writing Institute. Author of four poetry collections including chapbooks “A Potpourri of Emotions” (Local Gems Press, NY, 2020), “My Body is Not an Apology” (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and award-winning collection “My Body Lives Like a Threat” (FlowerSongPress, 2022) and “Language of the Wound is Love (FlowerSong Press, 2025). She also co-edited award-winning anthologies “The Medusa Project” (Mookychick, UK) and “The Kali Project" (Indie Blu(e) Press, USA). Her works have been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Recipient of “Certificate of Excellence” from Mayor Stephen Fulop, Jersey City, she was recently inducted as an honored listee for the 125-year-old Marquis Who's Who, sharing space with global luminaries such as Barack Obama, Malala Yousafzai, Warren Buffett, and many more. Her awards include a 2020 National Level Winner for the Poetry Matters Project, a Four-Time State Level Winner for the NAMI NJ Dara Axelrod Poetry Award, and Winner of the Broadside Poetry Festival at the San Gabriel Poetry Festival.
Her widely anthologized poems, essays, and other works discuss her experience as a first-generation immigrant and woman of color. Her 900+ works have been widely featured in print, online journals, public exhibits, and anthologies including the Poetry Society of New York, MS Magazine, NYPL, Pen Magazine by American Pen Women, Journal of NJ Poets, PBS American Portrait, NPR, WNYC Studio, etc and various US universities like Howard University, John Hopkins, Temple University, George Mason University, Stanford University etc. Her co-edited anthology “The Medusa Project” and other works have been selected to be sent to the moon in 2025 as part of the historical LunarCodex Project in collaboration with NASA. Find her: https://linktr.ee/meghasood
Ashlynn Delias is an accomplished 2024 alumni from Southwestern University who got her degree in religion and english. She’s a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Kappa, and Alpha Chi, where she presented her research on astrology and anxiety disorders at a national convention. She holds the David Knox Porter award for pre theology and the Norman Spellman Award for Excellence in Religious Studies. During her time at Southwestern she dove into the art of writing in all its forms and headed the university’s newspaper, The Megaphone, where she took the organization from post-pandemic depletion to 10th best in the nation for its online website. She also covered sports for the local paper, The Williamson County Sun, and tried her pen at magazine writing with HerCampus, a national magazine. You can find her on socials @scrawledinashes
