Join us for a luminous night of queer poetry to celebrate National Coming Out Day! Revel in community with local poets. Features will be followed by an open mic.
Doors at 6; show starts at 6:30 pm
Free parking across the street or around the corner on Susquehanna
Beer and wine (and non-alcoholic options) available for donation — no outside beverages, please
Tickets are $5 (no one turned away for lack of funds) and proceeds will benefit Blue Stoop. Purchase online or just show up!
About the performers:
Taylor Townes, also known as rough draft, is a poet, mixed media artist, teacher, storyteller, and community organizer born and raised in Philadelphia. With a passion for fostering spaces of collective creativity and healing, she currently works part time as a Co-Director for Blue Stoop, a home for Philly writers. Outside of work, she is an avid reader and writer, a paper and fiber artist, and can often be found at art exhibitions and events, seeking community and art wherever it may blossom. She shares her poetry on custom clothing with her brand Poetry for the Streets, is a creative lead on a digital healing project with Cry Collective, a project of Asian Arts Initiative, and is part of Voices in Power’s 2023 Millionaire’s Club for surpassing 3 Million Views across social platforms on her Spoken Word Performance “lay up”. She is a Philly Typewriter sponsored poet, recipient of the 2022 Judith Star Writing Award, and hopes to finally finish her first chapbook of poetry (eventually).
Vriddhi Vinay (they/she) is a South Indian New York City-based writer, poet, researcher, art reviewer, and poetic anthropologist. A December 2022 Temple University graduate, Vriddhi uses their multidisciplinary background to write about anti-colonial art, South Asian feminism, and sexuality. They love to explore the intersection of sexual reclamation, radical survivorship, community between brown women, queerness, and memory. The ethos of their art writing surrounds highlighting braveness, archive-keeping, and subversion in artistic works. Their work has appeared in Artblog Philadelphia, MUNDI Global Academic Journal, Kweli Journal, Tilted House, Cosmonauts Avenue, Apiary Magazine, and The Inklette Magazine. Find them at vriddhivinay.com to read more of their work.
Audrey Zee Whitesides is a poet & musician from Elizabethtown, KY, currently living in Philadelphia, PA. Her work touches desire, affect, queerness, capital, & the social. You can find her live or recorded with artists like Speedy Ortiz, Mal Blum, & Mel Stone, or on the internet talking about reality tv, anime, & old video games. Her work is published or forthcoming in Bullshit, Bone Bouquet, Eoagh, Glittermob, and more.
Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection Every Living Day (Thirty West, 2023). His poems can be found in The Offing, Poet Lore, Muzzle Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, was a finalist in Lucky Jefferson’s 2023 Poetry Prize, an honorable mention in The Maine Review’s Embody Awards, and a winner of Button Poetry’s 2018 Short Form Contest. He lives in Delaware.
Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer, nonbinary, mixed-race femme whose life work has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices to young people. Their poetry collection, The Other Tree, was the recipient of Harbor Editions’ 2024 Laureate Prize. They’re the author of four chapbooks: Philosophers Know Nothing About Love (Thirty West, 2022), queer feast (Bottlecap Press, 2022), sweet euphemism (CLASH!, 2023), and It Skips a Generation (Stanchion, 2023), as well as one full-length, METAMOURPHOSIS (fifth wheel press, 2024). Find out more at http://www.alisonlubar.com/ or on Twitter @theoriginalison.