Jawbone Returns This Friday with Michael Peters and Thom Francis

This coming Friday (January 25) Albany Poets and Jawbone are bringing poetry and spoken word back to the UAG Gallery on Lark Street with a new season of this long-running series featuring both local artists and visiting poets from around the country.

The doors open at 6:30PM with the poetry beginning at 7:00PM with writer, poet, and musician Michael Peters and Albany Poets own Thom Francis.

About Michael Peters

The “writing” attributable to “Michael Peters”—his poetry, his visual poetry, his fiction, his critical writing—has appeared in publications such as SleepingFish, Word for/Word, Lungfull, Xtant, Tool a Magazine, Spinning Jenny, Posted, American Weddings, and Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, to name a few. His visual poetry has appeared in galleries, anthologies, and exhibits, and can be found in various special collections and avant-garde libraries, among these: The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. As a musician and a sound-text performer, most notably in Poem Rocket, his recordings have been released on a variety of independent labels. In 2007, Atavistic (the avant jazz and rock label based out of Chicago), released Poem Rocket’s fourth full-length recording, a double-CD titled Invasion! Vaast Bin; n Ephemerisi is his first book.

For more, go to: http://www.calamaripress.com/vaast_bin.htm

About Thom Francis

Thom Francis, an upstate New York native, has been a writer and spoken word artist since he was old enough to understand, and therefore question the nature of the world in which we all exist. His skepticism, an attribute that seems to have been instilled in Thom since birth, has only been strengthened by the struggles in which he has encountered throughout the course of his thirty years of survival. These various struggles have made Thom an extremely strong and empathetic person, as well as the perfect candidate to pursue a calling in which he exposes the peculiarity exhibited by the human race. His work, based upon personal experience as well as general observations, always reveals an outlook commonly overlooked by the average observer.

Since Thom has been involved in the Albany area poety scene he has been featured at such open mics and events as The School of Night (Valentines), Vox (Albany Center Galleries), Web of Consciousness (C@fe Web), Live from the Living Room (Capital District Gay & Lesbian Community Center), Open Spoken (Colony Café, Woodstock), Kill Your TV, Feed Your Ears (Lark Street Bookshop), Third Thursday Poetry Open Mic (Lark Street Bookshop), Poets in the Park (Washington Park), the Albany Word Fest 2001, 2002 (Thacher Park), 2003 (Valentines), 2006 (UAG Gallery), and 2007 (Tess' Lark Tavern), and LARKfest 2006 and 2007.

For more, go to: http://www.albanypoets.com/poets/francis

Poets Speak Loud, January 28

The annual Poets Speak Loud Tom Nattell Memorial Open Mic and Beret Toss will take place on Monday, January 28 (the Last Monday of the month) at Tess' Lark Tavern, Madison Ave., Albany, NY starting at 7:30PM.  The guest host will be Dan Wilcox, the host of the monthly Third Thursday Poetry Night at the Social Justice Center.  The event includes an open mic for community poets and a post-reading parade to the Robert Burns statue in Washington Park to place a beret on the head of Robert Burns in honor of poet and environmental activist Tom Nattell who left us in January 2005 to join that Great Open Mic in the Sky.  The reading is free, but donations to support the Tom Nattell Peace Poetry Prize are appreciated.

Albany Poets sponsors "Poets Speak Loud", a poetry reading and open mic, on the last Monday of every month at the Lark Tavern at 7:30PM.  Tom Nattell was the host and organizer of the annual Readings Against the End of the World, Poets in the Park, and the open mic at the QE2 held on the last Monday of the month, among many achievements.  He had been scheduled to read at the first Poets Speak Loud! in January 2005, but died that morning.