West Hartford: Poetry Open Mic featuring Julie Choffel & Anna Ross

River Bend West Hartford is celebrating National Poetry Month with an Open Mic Night on Friday, April 21 at 6:30pm.  The event will feature poets Julie Choffel & Anna Ross. 

Sign ups for the Open Mic will be taken at the door on a first-come, first-served basis.  Poets are asked to limit their time to 3 minutes or one page.  

About the featured poets:

Julie Choffel is the author of the The Hello Delay (Fordham, 2012) and winner of the Poets Out Loud prize. Her poems can be found in New American Writing, Posit, Orion, Barrow Street, Interim, Salamander, and the tiny, among other places. Her newest work, The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love is a poem fueled by desire. To have "so many / ways to say I want" is dangerous and selfish, we've heard: we should be content; we should be grateful. But "women are never / not hungry," Choffel's mother-speaker insists, aware that her life plays out as two tracks in the same song-the material world of meals and routines as well as the imaginative realm. Originally from Austin, Texas, she currently lives near Hartford and teaches at the University of Connecticut.

Anna V. Q. Ross's previous poetry collections are If a Storm and the chapbooks Figuring and Hawk Weather. In her award-winning second book, Flutter-Fly, Anna transforms motherhood into a lens, examining narratives of girlhood, migration, trauma, and inheritance. Compassing home and horizon, this tightly woven, image-rich collection plumbs the political within the domestic and traces the routes of the past within everyday life.

Anna's awards include the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry, the New Women's Voices Prize in Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work appears in Harvard Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. Anna is the poetry editor for Salamander and teaches at Emerson College. She lives with her family in Dorchester, MA, where she runs the performance series Unearthed Song & Poetry and raises chickens.