Class Description

Let your voice be heard! We invite featured poets to read some of their work while other creatives are welcome to join our spoken word open mic. Sign up is at 6:45pm. This ongoing series is curated by Laura Salvatore. This month features poets Kristine Esser Slentz, Devin Kelly and Lynn McGee. Kristine Esser Slentz is a queer writer of Maltese descent, raised in the Chicagoland area. A cult escapee and GED holder, she is the author of EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose (FlowerSong Press, 2021, 2024) and the forthcoming collection face-to-faces (ThirtyWest Publishing House, 2026). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, TriQuarterly, Five Points, TEDx, and elsewhere. Kristine is the co-founder, organizer, and host of Adverse Abstraction, a monthly experimental artist series in New York City’s East Village. She also produces and performs in Verse & Vision, a stage production currently in a micro-residency at NYC’s Dada and headed for an upcoming run at the IndyFringe Festival. Follow her art on Substack at Carnations & Car Crashes. Devin Kelly is a high school teacher in New York City. He writes the newsletter Ordinary Plots, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Longreads, LitHub, The Year's Best Sportswriting, and more. His first novel, Pilgrims, was published in 2025 by Great Place Books. Lynn McGee is a poet living in New York City. Her most recent poetry collection is Science Says Yes, released in December 2024 from Broadstone Books. Other collections include Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two award-winning poetry chapbooks: Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1997).