Caffe Lena Poetry Open Mic Featuring Melody Davis, Matthew Klane & James Belflow

This monthly event, hosted by Carol Graser, takes place on the first Wednesday of every month. Sign up starts at 7 and readings start at 7:30. Each open mic poet reads two short poems (less than one page) or one longer poem. All styles of poetry are welcome. Free for Students. Matthew Klane is co-editor at Flim Forum Press. His books include Che (Stockport Flats, 2013) and B (Stockport Flats, 2008). An e-chapbook from Of the Day is online at Delete Press and an e-book My is forthcoming from Fence Digital (2016). He currently lives and writes in Albany, NY, where he co-curates the Yes! Poetry & Performance Series and teaches at Russell Sage College. James Belflower is a poet, critic, and performer who lives in Albany, NY with his wife, Jessica, and their dachshund, Jake. He received a Ph.D. in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics from SUNY Albany. His creative and critical work, broadly speaking, focuses on employing artistic models to investigate our embeddedness in the material world. He is the author of The Posture of Contour (Spring Gun Press 2013), Commuter (Instance Press 2009), and Bird Leaves the Cornice, winner of the 2011 Spring Gun Press Chapbook Prize. With Matthew Klane, he co-curates the Yes! Poetry and Performance Series whose mission is to bring writing into conversation with other art forms. James and Matthew will perform work from Canyons, (Flim Forum Press) a collection of images and texts combined in a powerful, profound reimagining of “Manifest Destiny” and its virulent consequences. Their performance is a combination of mulit-voices, projected collages, and sound environments using amps, pedals, a theremin and distorted voice effects. Melody Davis, a poet and art historian, is the author of four books including Holding the Curve from Broadstone Books, and Women's Views: The Narrative Stereograph in Nineteenth-Century America from the University Press of New Hampshire. With print maker, Harold Lohner, she has a traveling show of haiku and prints, One Ground Beetle. This spring (2017), it will be exhibited at the Perry County Council of the Arts in Newport, PA. Davis has held writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, and she was a finalist in the National Poetry Series. She is an associate professor of art history at the Sage College of Albany and publishes poetry and art criticism internationally.