Seven events in the last week of August in the Buffalo literary community.

Monday, Aug. 25, 10 a.m. to noon: Artpark Interactive Writing Workshop with Artpark 2025 Literary Resident, poet and teaching artist Christina Vega-Westhoff in Artpark’s Emerald Grove (South 4th St. entrance). Vega-Westhoff and workshop participants will collaborate together in close proximity to the Niagara River, as water beings who are part of the watershed and the escarpment’s history. Using their senses, they’ll experiment with remapping and writing through memory, speculation, and desire. Along the way, they’ll consider excerpts by writers and artists who create in relation to their environments. Site-specific source material includes text “URHA’NA’NI HE’KYE YEHĘWÁHKWA’THA (Picking Up Our Canoes at the Edge of the Woods)” at Artpark, in particular the translation: “truly it is so, that we and the waters are in the care of one other.” Free and open to the public.

Tuesday, Aug. 26, 7 p.m. to 8:45 p.m.: heARTburn civic arts meet-up at Burning Books, moderated by Robin Lee Jordan. At this session, participants will talk about art cooperatives (& collectives) and why these organizational models might be particularly conducive alternatives for civically-centered arts initiatives. Guests are Tim Stolinski from Buffalo Creative Workshop and Michael Heubusch of Cooperation Buffalo. They will talk about the potential of art cooperatives in the context of precarious arts funding (ex. NEA budget cuts) and the stifling of socially-relevant programming that can happen within the structures of arts institutions and the non-profit industrial complex. Burning Books, 420 Connecticut St., Buffalo. Free and open to the public.

Tuesday, Aug. 26, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.: Tuesday Night Open Mic Series at the Em Tea Coffeecup Café. All are welcome whether new to poetry or a long-time member of the community. 80 Oakgrove Ave., Buffalo, NY. Free and open to the public.

Thursday, Aug. 28, 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.: Variety Pack’s Workshop Series: Know Your Anthem, a Workshop on Identity Poetics with J.B. Stone. A digital event on Zoom only. $12 to attend, register at link below.

J.B. Stone (he/they) is a Neurodivergent/Autistic spoken word poet, playwright, teaching artist, writer, critic, and editor from Brooklyn, now residing in Buffalo, NY. They’re the author of three chapbooks including, Fireflies and Hand Grenades (Bottlecap Press 2022). J.B.’s also the founding EIC at Variety Pack, and a flash fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine. His fiction, poems, and has appeared in Blue Earth Review, Los Angeles Review, Button Poetry, Rain Taxi, Chicago Review of Books, The McNeese Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Peach Mag, The Buffalo News, Buffalo Spree, JMWW, among other spaces. Along with their various publications and editorial positions, J.B. has won, competed and placed in various Poetry Slams across the U.S. & Canada.

Link to register:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/variety-packs-workshop-series-know-your-anthem-w-jb-stone-tickets-1481832243129

Thursday, Aug. 28, 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Kenmore Village Improvement Society presents an Open Mic Poetry Night hosted by Geoffrey Gatza and featuring Buffalo-based poet Ida Goeckel. Free and open to the public. 7 Warren Ave., Kenmore, N.Y.

Thursday, Aug. 28, 7:30 p.m.: Book release party for My Fingernails Are Fresnel Lenses, an artists’ book by Chris Fritton with illustrations by Mary Goldthwaite.

My Fingernails Are Fresnel Lenses starts with the line: “In 2005, Japanese scientists confirmed a long held suspicion that the human body emanates detectable light.” What follows is a heartbreaking assessment of what it means to remember, what it means to forget, and how you share that with the people you love. A pocket-sized treatise on the neuroscience of memory, the physiology of photons, and the inevitability of loss: it’s the romance of science and the science of romance.

This event will feature an immersive reading experience, as well as music by Bryan Dubay. Music at 7:30, reading at 8 p.m. Free and open to the public. Books & music will be available for purchase. Fitz Books, 1462 Main St., Buffalo.

Saturday, Aug. 30, 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.: Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Silo City Reading Series featuring poets Donika Kelly and Nabila Lovelace, a musical performance by Austin, Texas-based singer-songwriter and producer Charlie Martin, and an installation by interdisciplinary visual artist Nicole Chochrek.

About the artists:

Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things, The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, she has received an NEA fellowship, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.

Nabila Lovelace is a first-generation Queens born poet, whose family is originally from Trinidad and Nigeria. The author of a debut collection of poems Sons of Achilles (YesYes Books, 2018), she lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she teaches at the University of Alabama.

Charlie Martin is a Texan singer-songwriter and producer. Charlie and collaborator Will Taylor combined likeminded batches of material to form the Austin-based project Hovvdy. Charlie’s debut album, Imaginary People, is out from Grand Jury.

Nicole Chochrek holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University at Buffalo (2022) and a Bachelor of Arts in Geography and Environmental Science from the University of North Texas (2015). As an interdisciplinary artist, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, from Al Shaheed Park in Kuwait (2016) to El Museo Gallery in Buffalo, New York (2022).

Her work has been supported by artist residencies including Laboratory Art + Residency in Spokane, Washington (2019); the UB Arts Collaboratory Student Residency in Buffalo, New York (2020-2021); the Immersive Art & Technology Initiative at Alfred University (2022); and the Soil Factory Residency at Cornell University (2025).

Beyond her studio practice, Chochrek has presented research on air quality and the impacts of fire season at the National Creative Placemaking Leadership Summit in Phoenix, Arizona (2019). She has worked with the Coalesce Center for Biological Art (2020-2022) and was awarded grants from Creatives Rebuild New York and NYSCA in partnership with CEPA Gallery (2022-2024). These grants supported the creation of Broken Plastics, an arts and education initiative that launched Microplastic Recycling Art Bins across Erie and Niagara County, New York. Research collected through this project was later presented at the New York State Microplastic Summit at the University at Buffalo (2024).

Chochrek continues to expand this work in collaboration with the Rozalia Project in Burlington, Vermont (2024-2025), and NATURE Lab in Troy, New York (2025).

Silo City Reading Series events take place in Marine A grain elevator, behind Duende at Silo City, 85 Silo City Row. Doors open at 7 p.m., and the events begin at 7:30 p.m. Books by featured poets in the series will be available for purchase by Buffalo bookseller Fitz Books. As of Aug. 9th, the event is sold out. Contact www.justbuffalo.org for further information.