(Photo: Writer and visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger)

By R.D. Pohl

Monday, 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Buffalo Reading Invasion —a flash mob-like gathering to celebrate the role of books, reading, public space and community in our lives.  Bring a book, a chair and several friends or family members for an hour of quiet reading in one of Buffalo’s best-loved public spaces.  This month’s location: East lawn, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House, 125 Jewett Parkway, Buffalo. Visit http://buffaloreadinginvasion.com/ for additional details.

Friday, 5 p.m. to  8 p.m.: Opening reception of “Tales from the Porch, Part IV: Art is a Language,” by Aitina Fareed-Cooke and Get Fokus’d Productions. 

Aitina Fareed-Cooke originally developed the “Tales from the Porch” project in 2019 as an opportunity to tell the stories and amplify the voices of members of the Buffalo, N.Y., community. In 2024, the Tales from the Porch project will focus on five artists with ties to Buffalo Arts Studio. 

Curated by Aitina Fareed-Cooke, “Tales from the Porch IV; Art is a Language” is an exploration of visual, performing and literary arts through a documentary film, multimedia arts exhibition and live performance series. The film will be screened at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and the Burchfield Penney Art Center (dates TBD) and features artists Julia Bottoms, Bob Fleming, George Hughes, Phyllis Thompson and Muhammad Zaman, all of whom share a deep connection with Buffalo Arts Studio.

Buffalo Arts Studio will present the multimedia exhibition “Tales from the Porch IV; Art is a Language,” which will include work by each of the artists in conversation with Fareed-Cooke’s photography and poetry. Buffalo Arts Studio, Tri-Main Center, 2495 Main Street, Suite 500, Buffalo.

For more information about Buffalo Arts Studio, please visit www.buffaloartsstudio.org

Friday, 6 p.m.: Fourth Friday Reading Series  at Dog Ears Books. This month’s featured reader is poet Melissa Liberatore, whose most recent book is Lost in Translation by BookLeaf Publishing. 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.

Saturday, 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.: Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Silo City Reading Series presents poets Michael McGriff and Cindy Juyoung Ok, along with a musical performance by the Austin, Texas-based regret pop band Sun June, and a visual art projection installation by award-winning Buffalo-based writer and visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger.

About the artists:

MICHAEL McGRIFF is the author of five poetry collections, Angel Sharpening its Beak, Eternal Sentences, Early Hour, Home Burial, and Dismantling the Hills. His other books include the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (co-authored with J.M. Tyree); an edition of David Wevill’s essential writing, To Build My Shadow a Fire; and a translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola. He co-directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Idaho.
 

He is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his work has been honored with a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, Bookforum, The Believer, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, and on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and PBS NewsHour. In addition to serving as co-director of the creative writing program at the University of Idaho, he works as an at-large editor for The Northwest Review.

CINDY JUYOUNG OK is a writer, an editor, and an educator. Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize. A MacDowell Fellow, her poems have been published in The Nation, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Ok was a finalist for a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, has served as a Poetry Foundation Library Forms & Features visiting teaching artist, and was a reviewer for Harriet Books in 2022-2023.

 ARIEL ABERG-RIGER is a visual storyteller who creates engaging, accessible stories about history, science, policy, and other forces that shape our lives. Her work explores issues of equity and social justice, on topics that range from environmental racism to the public library, and has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Teen Vogue, and more. Her debut book America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History won the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature and was a 2024 Finalist for the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award, in a addition to being named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library, Publisher’s Weekly, School Library Journal, and more. She is a big believer in the power of melding forms and morphing mediums to tell expansive stories. She lives with her wife and two kids in Buffalo, New York.

SUN JUNE is an Austin-based regret pop band. Their latest record Bad Dream Jaguar is out from Run For Cover Records.

Silo City (Marine A), 85 Silo City Row in Buffalo. Doors at 7:00 p.m. Reading begins at 7:30 p.m. Books of the featured poets are available for purchase from Fitz Books online and at the event. (As of July 14, the event was sold out)

Thanks for reading POETRY/POETICS/LANGUAGE/COMMUNITY with R.D. Pohl! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

R.D. Pohl has been writing about Buffalo’s literature scene for over four decades. His Buffalo literary calendar originally appears at https://rdpohl.substack.com.