Eight events this week in the Buffalo Literary Community, including book launches for Bianca Rae Messinger and Sara Ries Dziekonski

Tuesday, Aug. 5, 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.

Wednesday, Aug. 6, 7 p.m.: Ground and Sky Poetry Roundtable, the first Wednesday of every month, Ground and Sky meets in a hybrid option with the ‘no mic, no list, no podium’ format. Inspiration Point, 483 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo. Free and open to the public.

Wednesday, Aug. 6, 7 p.m.: Burning Books Progressive book Club and Jewish Voice for Peace present a discussion of Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings (Pluto Press).

Ghassan Kanafani (1936 – 1972) is perhaps the greatest Palestinian novelist, whose books including Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa documented the horrors of war and occupation. He was also a leading political thinker, strategist and revolutionary. Here, his writings on politics, history, national liberation and the media are collected in English for the first time.

Burning Books, 420 Connecticut St., Buffalo.

Wednesday, Aug. 6, 9 p.m.: Poetry Night at Caffe Aroma, biweekly open mic reading series hosted by Ben Brindise and Justin Karcher. 957 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo. Free and open to the public.

Thursday, Aug. 7., 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.: TEACHERS ARE WRITERS: Rewriting History with Nishant Batsha. This workshop will think through the power of historical fiction as a literary form. It also leave space to discuss the importance of historical fidelity versus fabulation, and what the two different modes offer the writer and the reader.

Nishant Batsha is the author of the novel Mother Ocean Father Nation, named a finalist for a 2023 Lambda Literary Award, longlisted for a 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and named one of the best books of 2022 by NPR. His new novel A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart will be published in July 2025 by Ecco/HaperCollins. Nishant holds a PhD in history from Columbia University where he was a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. He also works as a ghostwriter for public officials, CEOs, and leaders across various industries. Material he has ghostwritten has appeared in the New York Times and Politico, among other publications. He lives in Buffalo, NY with his wife and two children.

Just Buffalo Literary Center, 468 Washington Street, 2nd Floor, Buffalo, NY.

Thursday, Aug. 7, p.m.: Book launch reading for poet Bianca Rae Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle (Nightboat Books, 2025), with special guests Anna Moschovakis, Brian Whitener, and Diego Espíritu.

Bianca Rae Messinger is a poet and translator living and working in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of the chapbooks The Love of God (Inpatient Press, 2016) and parallel bars (Center for Book Arts, 2021) and translator of “In the Jungle There is Much to DO” [comunidad del sur [mauricio gatti], Berlin Biennale, 2020] among others. pleasureis amiracle is her first full-length collection of poems.

Anna Moschovakis is a poet, prose and fiction writer, translator, publisher, teacher and designer. Her most recent book is Participation (Coffee House Press, 2022), described as “a precarious novel about love and comradeship, the discomforts of desire, forms and functions of labor, and the embodied experience of reading and being read.” Her other books include the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love (Coffee House, 2018) and the poetry collections They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (Coffee House, 2016), You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (Coffee House, 2011), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press, 2006). Her translation of David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood Is Black (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) from French to English was awarded the 2021 International Booker Prize, which she shared with Diop. Moschovakis was also the translator of 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature awardee Annie Ernaux’s The Possession (Seven Stories Press, 2008). Moschovakis is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, and a co-founder of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY.

Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University at Buffalo and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil. His other projects include The 90s; De gente común: Prácticas estéticas y rebeldía social, co-edited with Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes; and the translation of Grupo de Arte Callejero’s Thoughts, Practices, and Actions with the Mareada Translation Collective.

Diego Espíritu Chávez holds a Philosophy degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and is a member of UNAM’s research and creation collective Arte+Ciencia. His work appears in Líneas en tierra. A Collection of Mexican Poems (Australian Poetry, 2019) and multiple editions of San Diego Annual Poetry. In 2022, he presented the lecture “Máquinas post_concretas: hacia una cartografía afectiva desde el arte con máquina de escribir” at the online conference Expanded Poetry: The Poetics and Politics of Repetition hosted by the Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa at the University of Porto. He teaches the expanded literature course Máquinas Post-Concretas on typewriter art, visual, and concrete poetry. In 2021, he joined the interdisciplinary arts program LIMINAL at CEIIDA, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. He is the author of Poemas Panks para community managers (Argentina: Santos Locos, 2016; México: Mantarraya, 2017) and the strange blue incandescence of mites (Paris: .able, 2024; Mexico: Imaginaria, 2023). Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Spanish Language and Literature at the University at Buffalo, focusing on poetics and visual writing.

Location: Fitz Books, 1462 Main St., Buffalo. Free and open to the public.

Friday, Aug. 8, 12 noon, Poet and Buffalo area native Sara Ries Dziekonski returns to the Woodlawn Diner, which her parents once owned, for the Buffalo area book launch and reading read from her latest collection of poems Today’s Specials, the Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection as runner up for Press 53 Award for Poetry.

Sara Ries Dziekonski is a Buffalo native and holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University. Her first full-length collection of poems Come In, We’re Open, won the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition and was published by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies Press in 2010. Her chapbooks include Snow Angels on the Living Room Floor (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Marrying Maracuyá, which won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Competition and was published by Main Street Rag in 2021. Her new full-length collection Today’s Specials was named Runner-Up in the Press 53 Poetry Award and published in September of 2024 as its Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection.

Her poems have appeared in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry,” and in the journals Slipstream, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, Connecticut River Review, and the anthology LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, among others.

For several decades, Sara’s mother and father owned and operated the Woodlawn Diner on Lake Shore Road (Rt. 5) in Blasdell, NY, a popular working-class dining spot for Buffalo factory workers and truckers before and after their shifts. Ries Dziekonski worked at the diner in her late teens and college years, and it serves as a backdrop for many of her poems. After receiving the Best MFA Thesis in Poetry Award at Chatham University in 2009 and a period of teaching ESL in South America, she returned home to create and host the much beloved Poetry and Dinner Night at the Woodlawn Diner Series, which for nearly a decade became one of the hottest tickets on the Buffalo poetry scene.

Ries Dziekonski now lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, with her husband, two children, and a cat. She is the co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing and Submission Services and teaches creative writing for the nonprofit literary organization Keep St. Pete Lit.

Woodlawn Diner, 3200 Lake Shore Rd. (Rt. 5), Blasdell, NY 14219.

Friday, Aug. 8, 7 p.m.: Ground & Sky Poetry Open Mic in Bidwell Park hosted by Joel Lesses. Elmwood Avenue at Bidwell Avenue, Buffalo. Free and open to the public.