Caffè Lena Poetry Open Mic Elaine Handley

This monthly event, hosted by Carol Graser, takes place on the first Wednesday of every month and includes an open mic reading as well as featured poets. Sign up for the open mic starts at 7:00 and readings start at 7:30. The feature this month is Elaine Handley. Elaine Handley is a professor of writing and literature at SUNY Empire State College and is on the faculty of the NYS Young Writers Institute. Her latest chapbook of poetry, Securing the Perimeter, published by Clare Songbird Publishing House, was shaped by her work with veterans and her collaboration with encaustic painter Marco Montanari. Her poetry explores territory on both sides of our perimeters, the tender and the harsh. In her collaboration with Montanari, where they each created work in response to the other’s, she probed the transcendent and lyrical possibilities of one art form informing another. She is the winner, with writing partners Mary Sanders Shartle and Marilyn McCabe, of three Adirondack Center for Writing best books of poetry awards. She is a member of the Women of Mass Dissemination Writing Group (the WMDs) as well as the fiction group Shut Up and Write Please (SUAWP).