Join us on Thursday April 18 for an open mic and feature from Alison Rollins! Alison has a brand new book coming out, available at this show! Lets help her celebrate!
Doors open and sign-up sheets are posted at 7pm. Be on time to make sure you have a spot!
Admission is $5 or pay what you can. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
OPEN MIC: open to all artists of all genres, and all ages! Bring your songs, poems, and prose! You'll have 5 minutes MAX on the mic, please be considerate of time! Think 2 short poems (2 minutes each) or 1 long poem or song.
MORE ABOUT OUR FEATURE:
Alison C. Rollins (born and raised in St. Louis city) holds a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University, a Master of Library and Information Science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a Bachelor of Science from Howard University. Her next poetry collection, Black Bell, is out this April from Copper Canyon Press. Rollins was named a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow in 2019. In 2021, her essay "Dispatch from the Racial Mountain" was selected by contest judge Kiese Laymon as the winner of the Gulf Coast prize in nonfiction. Her work, across genres, has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and is a recipient of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award. A 2020 Pushcart Prize winner, her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Rollins has held faculty as well as librarian appointments at various institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.