Poetry Promise Posts

Join us at the Winchester Cultural Center from 7:00 to 8:30 PM for a reading and open mic featuring Joyce Lee. For this event, the first 20 minutes will be a hybrid of spoken word, storytelling, and new poems from Joyce. During the second half of this intimate event, audience members can sign up on a workshop open mic list. Joyce Lee and Clark County Poet Laureate Vogue Robinson will listen to the audience’s poems and provide them performance/writing feedback. The room seats 33 people; early/on-time arrival is encouraged for sign-ups! Admission is FREE!

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Joyce Lee is a writer, educator, performer, poet and an Oakland, California native whose gift with words and expression have made her an international talent. She has been a performance competitor since the age of eleven. Joyce Lee performed at Yoshi’s of San Francisco, Oakland’s First Annual Pride Parade, Oakland’s Annual Art & Soul Festival, The Ill-list, and San Francisco’s Theatre in the Vagina Monologues to fund for Womyn’s shelters in Haiti and continues to give bone-chilling performances, making her a favorite featured storyteller for WNYC’s Snap Judgement.

What’s Joyce up to these days? She currently resides in Medellin, Columbia teaching English for Coningles.  Columbia has inspired her to found and curate a Writing Workshop called Opalo. Her first novel, Good Mourning, David, is forthcoming.

Event begins at 7 PM at the Winchester Cultural Center:
3130 McLeod Dr, Las Vegas, NV 89121

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Join us at Nevada Humanities for the First Friday Reading featuring Jennifer Battisti and Bruce Isaacson. Hosted by Ashley M. Vargas and Heather Lang-Cassera. Admission is FREE!

Jennifer Battisti, a Las Vegas native, studied creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada. Her work has appeared in the anthology, Legs of Tumbleweed, Wings of Lace, and is forthcoming in Where We Live, an anthology of writing and art in response to the October 1st tragedy, as well as The Desert Companion, Minerva Rising, The Citron Review, FLARE, Helen: A Literary magazine,The Red Rock Review, 300 Days of Summer and elsewhere. In 2016 Nevada Public Radio interviewed her about her poetry. She holds a leadership position on the Las Vegas Poets Organization and is the administer and a participating Teaching Artist for the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in Nevada. Her first chapbook, Echo Bay, was published in 2018.

Bruce Isaacson was the first Poet Laureate of Clark County, Nevada. He is publisher of Zeitgeist Press, with over 100 books to date, and has lived in Michoacán, Mexico, New York City, Los Angeles, Berkeley-San Francisco, and Leningrad, Russia.

Event begins at 7 PM at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery:
1017 S. First Street #190, Las Vegas, NV 89101
702-800-4670 … www.nevadahumanities.org

We’re excited to announce that renowned poet, activist, and Zeitgeist Press author Jan Steckel will lead a workshop on Thursday, May 31 and will give a reading on Sunday, June 3!

Jan Steckel is a Harvard-Yale trained pediatrician (retired) will be reading her poetry in Las Vegas!  Her book of poems, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist), won the Lambda Literary Award for 2011. Her chapbook the Underwater Hospital won a Rainbow Award in 2011 and her Mixing Tracks won the Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook Award in 2009. Jan also worked in the Peace Corps in Latin America, as evidenced by some of her moving poems. Her work is direct, uncompromising, lyrical, and filled with moving moments of intimacy, love and loss.

To prep for her reading, Bruce Isaacson will lead a workshop on the poetry of this activist for bisexual and disability rights, poet, writer, and editor on May 12th at 12:30 pm at Pearson Center!

 

Saul Williams is one of the most celebrated and globally recognized American poets living today. After the release of his internationally acclaimed film, Slam (Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize and the Cannes Camera D’Or-1998), which he co-wrote and starred in, he has been the figure-head of the Slam Poetry movement and has been asked to read and perform his poetry in over 30 countries and more than 300 universities in the U.S. alone. Invitations to share his work have spanned from the White House, the Sydney Opera House, Lincoln Center, The Louvre, The Getty Center, Queen Elizabeth Hall, to countless schools, villages, community centers, and prisons around the world. He is the only poet to have published 4 books of poetry through MTV Books (Simon and Schuster) and has had his poems and works translated into several languages.

We are proud to present this excellent and multi-talented individual at 2 events on Saturday, September 23, 2017!

First Event:
Stay on Beat, Poet: Workshop and Lecture
3:00 – 4:30 p.m. at Left of Center Gallery
2207 W. Gowan Rd, North Las Vegas, NV 89032
Seating is limited, please arrive early.

Second Event:
Book Signing and Reading
6:00 – 7:30 p.m. at Pearson Community Center
1625 West Carey, North Las Vegas, NV 89032

 

 

 

Check out some photos from the festivities
this Saturday, Jul. 15th 5:00 p.m.  
The Writer’s Block
1020 Fremont St., Las Vegas, NV 89101
A short open mic followed these phenomenal features:
Chay the Poet, Jake Purcell, Mark Snyder, James Norman, Chris Cipollini, Tami Belt, Madeline Beckwith, Bakeem Lloyd,
Alice Vo Edwards, Renee Christy, & Vogue Robinson

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We had a phenomenal time this past weekend at the Henderson Barnes & Noble. We had a successful fundraiser, but more importantly, a successful reading. For many of us, our love for reading was fostered in libraries and bookstores. Last weekend, we were all given a chance to connect to new readers. Hopefully, a complete stranger to poetry picked up the anthology and took it home. Maybe one of our poems will spark their love of poetry. And wouldn’t that be marvelous? Keep writing, poets. Keep reading 🙂

These lovely photos were taken by Rodney J. Lee, author of A Page and a Pen 

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Poetry collection features voices of 95 poets from Clark County

“Clark: Poetry from Clark County, Nevada” (Zeitgeist Press, $18) – a 280 page anthology with 95 writers and 12 artists from Clark County – was introduced last weekend during a reading and book release party at Winchester Cultural Center!

Look ma! We’re in the paper!

Vogue Robinson named Clark County’s new poet laureate

https://lasvegasweekly.com/intersection/2017/apr/27/meet-clark-countys-poet-laureate-vogue-robinson/

David Lehman is coming to Nevada in May to do a reading and workshop! David Lehman is one of America’s leading poets using humor and everyday language to bring us great insight into the most powerful thoughts and feelings of life. His books include Yeshiva Boys, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters American Songs, and most recently, Poems in the Manner of…. He edits the Best American Poetry series, and the Oxford Book of American Poetry.

Won’t you join us at one of these great events?
Poetry Reading
Saturday, May 20th
7:00 – 8:30 p.m. at Writer’s Block
1020 Fremont St #100, Las Vegas, NV 89101

Lecture & Discussion
Sunday, May 21st
Dylan, the Nobel, & the Jewish American Songbook
3:00 – 4:30 p.m.
at Congregation Ner Tamid, Beit Tefillah
55 N Valle Verde Dr. Henderson, NV 89074

Ariel Horton is our 2017 Poetry Promise Award Recipient!
About Ariel: I am an eighteen-year-old high school senior. I was born in Pasadena, California and I moved with my family to Henderson at the green age of five. Since my relocation, I have struggled: battling years of psychological disorder and the sudden death of my father, surmounting in overdose, hospitalization, and ongoing recovery. In my case, the pen has, indeed, been mightier than the pill bottle.

College has always been a priority to me, but high school has always been a struggle. Through wars both with myself and with a standardized, antiquated system, I have never had impressive grades or example attendance to offer as a testament to my passion for learning. Though I worked on my college applications for years in an attempt to overcompensate, I was only accepted into one institution, Whittier College: a small, private liberal arts school near Los Angeles. Despite this blow to my confidence, in the past few months, I have been immensely encouraged and deeply gratified by honors including a Gold Medal in the scholastic art and writing awards and this, the Poetry Promise award, and I feel, perhaps for the first time, worthy of pursuing my art. As I carry on to Whittier, I will pursue a degree in creative writing and begin working to bridge the gap between aspiring writer and professional writer. I know that I will thrive in the small classes and liberal arts curriculum at Whittier, and I will use this new environment to my advantage to continue to foster my skills as a young poet.