The final Screening Room Poetry Series reading, Wednesday Night Live at Caffe Aroma, and a UB Poetics Plus Book Talk by Amy De’Ath are noteworthy this week.

Wednesday, February 18th, 7:30 p.m.: The final Screening Room Reading Series event co-hosted by Kevin Koch and Ida Goeckel and featuring poet Dallas Taylor. The Screening Room Cinema Café closes at the end of February.

Dallas Taylor is a Buffalo-based poet, writer, and performer whose work explores the intersections of language, rhythm, and cultural storytelling. Blending spoken word with raw emotion, his poetry attempts to capture themes of identity, resilience, and human connection.

Additional reading slots available. The Screening Room Cinema Café, 880 Alberta Drive, Amherst. $4.

Wednesday, February 18th, 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.: Wednesday Night Live at Caffe Aroma featuring multidisciplinary writer, performer & teaching artist Brandon Williamson .
Brandon Williamson is a poet, spoken word artist, actor and performer with Ujima Theater Company, and organizer and coordinator of poetry slams across the United States and internationally.

Williamson, who was born, raised, and continues to live in Buffalo, has performed on stages across North America and Europe. He graduated from the State University of New York at Fredonia in 2007 with a Bachelors of Arts Degree in Theatre. Brandon began his career as a high school theater teacher. A few years later, he changed directions and returned to SUNY Fredonia to become an Admissions Counselor to not only fulfill his joy of working with students, but also to give back to the community. During his nine years as an Admissions Counselor, Brandon also founded Pure Ink Poetry and wrote and published two books of poetry.

Brandon describes himself as a “Storyteller, creativity consultant, innovation specialist, and founder of the internationally recognized Pure Ink Poetry organization in Buffalo, NY and with experience serving as a school administrator, college admissions counselor, high school teacher, college advisor, minister, poet, actor, musician, author, athlete, producer, community activist, professional wrestler, and innovator.”

He is the recipient of an Excellence in Education nomination as a Buffalo Schools Administrator and a recipient of the Buffalo Business First’s 40 under 40 award.

Open mic hosted by Ben Brindise and Justin Karcher to follow. 957 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo. Free and open to the public.

Thursday, February 19th, 3 p.m.: University at Buffalo Poetics Plus Seriess s Book talk with Amy De’Ath (Tufts University), on her new book Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford University Press, 2026).

In her first book of literary criticism, Amy De’Ath develops a new type of feminist literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital’s impersonal compulsions – by what happens “behind our backs”. Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil and others, Behind Our Backs explains how capital’s gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the poetic experiments of trans, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic writing.

De’Ath’s talk will be followed by discussion and a reception.

Location: UB Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall, UB North Campus.

Sponsors: The UB Poetry Collection, UB English Department, and the UB Humanities Institute.

Free to attend.

Amy De’Ath is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University. She is the author of Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford University Press, 2026) and the poetry collection Not A Force of Nature (Futurepoem, 2024). She is also the editor of “Total Sexual Difference,” a dossier forthcoming from Meditations journal in Spring 2026. She lives in Boston, on the unceded territories of the Massachusee and the Mashpee Wôpanâak First Peoples.