Virtual Literary Open Mic and Reading Series
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Our Featured Readers

Michael Anania was born in 1939 in Omaha, Nebraska and studied at the University of Nebraska and the University at Buffalo. He has published fifteen books of poetry, most recently Heat Lines (2006), Continuous Showings (2017), Nightsongs and Clamors (2018), and In Time (2024). He has also published a novel, The Red Menace, and a collection of essays. His work has been widely anthologized, and his poetry and prose have been translated into German, French, Italian and Spanish. He worked as an editor at Audit, Audit/Poetry, Partisan Review and Tri-Quarterly and was poetry and literary editor of The Swallow Press. Anania taught at Buffalo, Northwestern University, The University of Chicago and is emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he twice directed the Graduate Program for Writers. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, 2023), which received 5 stars from Roxane Gay, was named among the “Best Poetry of the Last Year” by Ms. Magazine, and was selected as a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023. She is the author of Brown Girl Polaris (a Belladonna chaplet), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry; and author of Blue Hallelujahs. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus and other outlets. She lives in New York but travels widely for poetry

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