Wednesday Night Live, a reading at The Buffalo AKG Art Museum by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and Mark Nowak’s Buffalo book launch for …AGAIN are among the events this week.

Wednesday, April 15, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm: Reading & Discussion: Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude with poet Joshua Thermidor.

Join Just Buffalo Literary Center for an evening dedicated to “serious noticing.” As part of our city-wide In Gratitude project, poet and teaching artist Joshua Thermidor will lead a discussion into Ross Gay’s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Whether you are a lifelong reader of Gay’s work or picking up the book for the first time, we will explore Gay’s open-hearted, lyrical lines and discuss how the simple act of naming our delights can become a radical tool for connection. First 5 people to register receive a free copy of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Copies of Ross Gay’s books can be found at independent bookstores across Buffalo.

Joshua Thermidor is a writer and visual artist of the Haitian diaspora who believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of all oppressed people.

His photographs have appeared in TIME, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and NBC News. His poems and prose have appeared in River Styx, The Seventh Wave, Spotlights: Habibi Funk Print and elsewhere. He currently serves as Editor of Creative Nonfiction at Brink Literary and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Location: Duende at Silo City

85 Silo City Row Buffalo, NY 14203

https://duendesilo.city

Wednesday, April 15. 7 p.m.: The Screening Room Poetry Series featuring poet Veronica Jaycox. Additional reading slots available. New temporary location: The Hon. Shirley Chisholm/Audubon Library Meeting Room, 350 John James Audubon Parkway, Amherst, NY 14228. Free and open to the public.

Wednesday, April 15, 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.: Wednesday Night Live at Caffe Aroma featuring Portland, Maine based poet and publisher Kevin Bertolero.

Visiting from Portland, Maine, Bertolo will be hosting a free-to-attend writing workshop at the Caffe at Amy’s, 3234 Main St. in Buffalo from 6 pm to 7:30pm and then be the featured poet at Wednesday Night Live at Caffe Aroma at 9 p.m. in the Elmwood Village.

Kevin Bertolero is the founding publisher of both Ghost City Press and & Change Poetry. He was also a founding member of the Kettle Pond Writers’ Conference. He holds degrees in literature from Potsdam College and the University of New Hampshire, as well as an MFA from New England College. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Open mic hosted by Ben Brindise and Justin Karcher, their last as curators of the Wednesday Night Live Series, to follow. 957 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo. Free and open to the public.

Thursday, April 16, 7 p.m.: Gunilla Theander Kester will read from her forthcoming collection Hold Me Still (Main Street Rag Publishing Company) at Congregation Shir Shalom, 2660 Sheridan Drive, Williamsville, NY. The event is free and open to the public.

About the Author:

Swedish-born Gunilla Theander Kester is the and award-winning author and co-author of seven books, including her most recent collection of poems Hold Me Still to be published in July by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Her earlier publications include If I Were More Like Myself (The Writer’s Den, 2015), two poetry chapbooks, Mysteries I-XXIII (2011) and Time of Sand and Teeth (2009) published by Finishing Line Press.

A Fulbright Scholar, she authored a study entitled Writing the Subject: Bildung and the African American Text (New York: Peter Lang, 1995, 2nd ed. 1997), and has published many articles in academic journals and anthologies. She was co-editor of The Empty Chair: Love and Loss in the Wake of Flight 3407 (2010), and The Still Empty Chair: More Writings Inspired by Flight 3407 (2011). Kester has also published numerous poems in Swedish anthologies and magazines, including Bonniers Litterära Magasin, Sweden’s most prestigious literary magazine.

Her current projects include contributions to Consequence Forum, work on another collection of poetry, and a memoir entitled Streetness Speaks. An accomplished classical guitarist, Gunilla often performs and has taught classical guitar at The Amherst School of Music.

Friday, April 17, 1 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.: The Buffalo AKG Art Museum hosts a special poetry reading by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who wrote two poems featured in the exhibition Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way on Friday, April 17, 1 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Kicking off the day, local poets from Los Artistas del Barrio Buffalo will set the stage with select poetry readings from their own collections. Following the readings, Herrera will be signing copies of his books.

The event will take place in the Lipsey Auditorium of Seymour H. Knox Building and Wilson Town Square at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, 1280 Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo. It is free and open to the public.

Prior to the reading on Thursday, April 16, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera will lead an Exhibition Walkthrough & Poetry Workshop in conjunction with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s ongoing exhibit in which two poems of his are featured and provide the exhibit’s title. The workshop is also free and open to the public, but registration is required. Visit https://buffaloakg.org/events/ to register.

About the Author

Juan Felipe Herrera was the 21st U.S. Poet Laureate from 2015-2017, the first Latino to receive this honor. The son of migrant farm workers, he was educated at UCLA and Stanford University, and received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His numerous poetry collections include Everyday We Get More Illegal (City Lights Publishing, 2020) , Notes on the Assemblage (2015), 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 (2007), Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (2008), and Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (1999), and . Notes on the Assemblage was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Library Journal, NPR, and BuzzFeed. In addition to publishing more than a dozen collections of poetry, Herrera has written short stories, young adult novels, and children’s literature.

In 2012, Herrera was named California’s poet laureate. He has won the Hungry Mind Award of Distinction, the Focal Award, two Latino Hall of Fame Poetry Awards, and a PEN West Poetry Award. In April 2016, Herrera received the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times. His other honors include the UC Berkeley Regent’s Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Stanford Chicano Fellows. More recently, in 2021 he received Los Angeles Review of Books/UC Riverside Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award, The Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry in 2023, and in 2024 was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

He has also received several grants from the California Arts Council.

Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth. His creative work often crosses genres, including poetry, opera, and dance theater. His children’s book, The Upside Down Boy (2000), was adapted into a musical. His books for young people have won several awards, including Calling the Doves (2001), winner of the Ezra Jack Keats Award, and CrashBoomLove (1999), a novel-in-verse for young adults, which won the Americas Award. His poetry collection Half of the World in Light was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize in 2009. Herrera lives in Fresno, CA.

Friday, April 17, 5 p.m.: The University at Buffalo Poetics Plus Series and Fitz Books will present a book talk and book launch event for Mark Nowak’s … AGAIN (Coffee House Press, 2026), his new serial abecedarian documentary poem about January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol and its aftermath in America. Copies of Nowak’s new book will be available for signing. The event is free and open to the public at Fitz Books, 1462 Main Street in Buffalo.

ABOUT THE POET

Mark Nowak is a poet, writer, social critic, and labor activist whose books include Revenants (Coffee House Press, 2000), Shut Up Shut Down: Poems (Coffee House Press, 2004), Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009), and Social Poetics (Coffee House Press, 2020).

… AGAIN from Coffee House Press is Nowak’s new serial abecedarian documentary poem about January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol and its aftermath in America. Poet and critic Anne Boyer has called “…Again” a “work of structural fury.”

A native of Buffalo, NY, Nowak is a professor of English at Manhattanville College and the founding director, in collaboration with PEN America, of the Worker Writers School (https://www.workerwriters.org) an international organization which links the global working class to literary practice. He edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021), guest-edited the “Why We Write” issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2021), and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022).

Nowak has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations as well as the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism from Split This Rock. He has taught at St. Catherine University and Washington College, where he also worked as the director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House. He has led poetry workshops for workers and trade unions in Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa.

Saturday, April 18, 6 p.m.: Typography of Women presents the first of five performances that are reenactments of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail.

The program will consist of a dramatization and enactment of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail, which he wrote while spending 11 days in a Birmingham, Alabama jail for leading a protest march seeking justice.

The creation of the letter is told through music and the voices of Dr. King (1963) and Dr. King (2021), if he were part of the BLM movement, and how t the fight for justice continues today. The program features actors John Vines and Dallas Taylor as Dr. King (1963) and Dr. King (2021). Featured musicians are actor/vocalist Mary Craig as the Historian, Michael Solo Farrow as the Troubadour/Bard, and Abdul Rahman Qadir as the percussionist. This program is made possible with support from Rigidized Metals.

Performances are Free and Open to the public. Free and accessible parking at all venues. All venues are wheelchair accessible except at the Buffalo City Ballet studios.

Dates and times are:

Saturday, April 18th, 6pm at the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor building at 119 Broadway at Elm Street, 14203 in downtown Buffalo.

Sunday, April 19th, 2:30pm, Frank E. Merriweather Library, 1324 Jefferson Avenue at E. Utica Street, 14208

Thursday, April 23rd, 7pm, St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church,

555 Northampton Street, 14208 – near Science Museum

Saturday, April 25th, 6:30pm and Sunday, April 26th, 5:30pm, Buffalo City Ballet Black Box Theater Loft, 307 Leroy Avenue, 14214, parking and entrance in the rear of the building, Main/Fillmore area.

Performers in the cast are:

John Vines, Dr. King, 1963

Dallas Taylor, Dr. King, 2021

Mary Craig, Historian & vocalist

Michael Solo Farrow, Bard & musician

Abdul-Rahman Qadir, Percussionist

This production was originally made possible by a Civil Writes grant from Just Buffalo Literary Center and is now sponsored by Rigidized Metals.