Nine events this week in the Buffalo area literary community.

By R.D. Pohl
(Image above: Noah Falck, Literary Director of Just Buffalo Literary Center and curator of the Silo City Reading Series)

Tuesday, July 22, 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, July 23, 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.: Wednesday Night Live at Caffe Aroma featuring City of Buffalo Poet Laureate Aitina Fareed-Cooke. Open mic hosted by Ben Brindise and Justin Karcher to follow.

Aitina Fareed-Cooke initially pursued creative arts strategies through poetry, lyricism, and digital storytelling as a means to address early childhood trauma. She has since become an award-winning entrepreneur, educator, and national recording artist (under the name A.I. The Anomaly). Fareed-Cooke has spent close to 2 decades providing creative arts strategies for nonprofit organizations, government entities, corporations, educators, and emerging artists. In 2012, Fareed-Cooke founded Get Fokus’d Productions (GFP), an award-winning creative media arts production company specializing in “human-first” storytelling, mentoring emerging artists, and elevating community voices through a social design approach.

957 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo. Free and open to the public.

Thursday, July 24, 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.: TEACHERS ARE WRITERS: Leaps and Turns: Exploring the Creative Essay with Laura Marris.
This workshop will explore the unfolding beauty of the essay form and the ways it can capture curiosity on the page. It will focus on how creative nonfiction can invite us to question, develop associations, and listen to the self. We’ll also look at developing organic structures for the essay that are designed to reflect each person’s unique patterns of thought.

This workshop is FREE and aimed at teachers. Buffalo Public School teachers can register on PGS; non-BPS teachers register by emailing Molly Eldridge at MEldridge@buffaloschools.org

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, The TLS, The New York Times, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, a Katharine Bakeless Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, was published in August 2024 by Graywolf Press.

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

Thursday, July 24, 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 John Rigney. Free and open to the public. 7 Warren Ave., Kenmore, N.Y.

Friday, July 25, 6 p.m.: Fourth Friday Reading Series at Dog Ears Books. This month’s featured reader is poet Patti Kadick. Additional reading slots available. Dog Ears Bookstore and Cafe, 688 Abbott Road, 2nd floor, in Buffalo. Admission to the event is $5. Proceeds benefit the Dog Ears Bookstore, a 501 c (3) not-for-profit organization.

Friday, July 25, 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.

Saturday, July 26, 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.: Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Silo City Reading Series featuring poets Andrew Grace and Kenzie Allen, a musical performance by happygroupppp, and an installation by visual artist Crystal Z Campbell.

About the artists:

Andrew Grace has published three books of poems: A Belonging Field (Salt Publishing), Shadeland (Ohio State University Press) and SANCTA (Ahsahta/Foundlings). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review and New Criterion. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he is a Senior Editor at the Kenyon Review and teaches at Kenyon College. His fourth collection A Brief History of the Midwest was published by Black Lawrence Press in May 2025.

Kenzie Allen is the author of Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024). She is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist, and the recipient of a 92NY Discovery Prize, an inaugural James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, the 49th Parallel Award in poetry, and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Writers’ Foundation, and In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets). A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative magazine, Best New Poets, and other venues. She is a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.

happygroupppp is an experimental music project from Buffalo, NY utilizing electronic and acoustic instrumentation along with field recordings to explore personal resonance through song forms.

Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved. Working through archives and omissions, Campbell finds complex­ity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s recent works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps in the narrative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks’ “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification, or reference traces of US colonialism in the Philippines.

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 July 14th, the event is sold out. Contact http://www.justbuffalo.org for further information.

Sunday, July 27, 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.: Reading and book launch event for J.Tim Raymond’s memoir My Year of Marginal Mishaps, 1967.

Stepping back into the analog world of 1967, a turbulent time of change, the author takes a detour from student life to live among his peers, travel across the country, find romance and experience independence. The Vietnam War was on the nightly news and
the United States military needed all available men. Caught between the attitudes of a traditional World War II generation and the emerging free-thinking youth culture of the time, he learns about his own abilities to survive and navigate the challenges all with sketchbook, pen and ink.

Fitz Books, 1462 Main Street, Buffalo.

Sunday, July 27, 3 p.m.: Pure Ink Poetry Slam, a monthly, two-round spoken word and poetry slam competition series hosted by Brandon Williamson. Pure Ink Poetry Slam is always an open slam without specific themes or requirements other than the general rules of slam. Sign up is from 3 p.m. Open mic and slam starts at 3:30. $5 for slammers, $10 for spectators. Cash prize for the winner. Visit the website http://www.pureinkpoetry.com for more information.