Open Mic following the Featured Readers — feel free to share one poem, one page.
At Casey Community Center, 810 S Frederick Ave, Gaithersburg, MD 20877
Poet and publisher, Le Hinton, is the author of seven collections including, most recently, Elegies for an Empire (2023) and Sing Silence (2018), both from Iris G. Press. His work has been widely published and can be found in The Best American Poetry 2014, The Baltimore Review, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The Progressive magazine, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, The Summerset Review, and elsewhere. His poems have received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and have been nominated for Best of the Net. His poem, “Epidemic,” won The Baltimore Review’s 2013 Winter Writers Contest. In 2014 it was honored by The Pennsylvania Center for the Book, and in 2021 it was featured on the WPSU program, “Poetry Moment.” His poem, “Our Ballpark,” can be found outside Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, incorporated into Derek Parker’s sculpture Common Thread.
Lisa J. Munson is a prize-winning poet and co-editor of the poetry journal Fledgling Rag (pub. Iris G. Press). Currently her poem the next storm received an honorable mention for the 2024 PA Poetry Society’s (PPS) 75th Anniversary Ars Poetica / Poetry Competition. Although her work recently appeared in Tony Israel’s photo exhibit “Living Roots, Artists for Climate Action” in Lancaster, PA, her poetry publication credits include The Sylvan, MiPOesias, The Delaware Poetry Review, Cape Gazette, Haggard and Halloo, and Amaranth. She has been an adjudicator for the World Artists Experiences’ Writing Project and Poetry Out Loud Regional Competition as well as a featured reader in the Lancaster, and mid-Atlantic areas. During her tenure in Maryland, she established and ran the reading series Poetry in the Park in Severna Park. Although her academic and former lives as musician, teacher, and paralegal have informed her work as a poet, her highly sensitive, intuitive, perceptive nature, and Buddhism continue to shape and influence the themes of connection, love, and profound loss found in her poetry.
DiVerse Gaithersburg 