11/8 Poetry Reading: Burroughs / Baldinger / Pavey @ Visible Voice Books

7:30 PM FRIDAY in Cleveland…

Shawn Pavey has delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, bagged groceries, cut meat, laid sewer pipe, bussed tables, washed dishes, roofed houses, crunched numbers, rented cars, worked in hotels, worn an apron at Kinko’s, and been paid to write everything from résumés to music reviews. Currently, he earns a living as an Executive Recruiter in Mission, KS where he lives with his wife and two worthless but adorable cats. He’s hosted poetry readings in bars, coffee shops, haunted houses, bookstores, libraries, front porches, seedy motel rooms, and abandoned warehouses. He is the author of Talking to Shadows (2008, Main Street Rag Press),Nobody Steals the Towels from a Motel 6 (2015, Spartan Press), and Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse(Spartan Press, 2019). He is a Co-founder and former Associate Editor of The Main Street Rag Literary Journal, and a former board member and officer of The Writers Place, a Kansas City-based literary non-profit. His poems, essays, and journalism appear in a variety of national and regional publications. A graduate of the University of North Carolina’s Undergraduate Honors Creative Writing Program, he likes his Tom Waits loud, his bourbon single-barrel, and his basketball Carolina Blue.

Jason Baldinger is a poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A recent Writer in Residence at Osage Arts Community, he is co-founder and co-director of The Bridge Series. He has multiple books available including The Better Angels of our Nature (Kung Fu Treachery) and Everyone’s Alone Tonight with James Benger (Kung Fu Treachery Press). He has done collaboration work with the poets John Dorsey and Charles Cicirella – the latter can be heard on Bandcamp under the moniker Commissioner Gordon. His work has been published widely in print journals and online. You can listen to him read his work on Bandcamp and on lps by the bands Theremonster and The Gotobeds.

John Burroughs of Cleveland is the 2019-2021 Beat Poet Laureate for the state of Ohio. He is a dynamic performer who has wowed audiences from Oakland to New York City and myriad points in between. His more than a dozen books include Rattle and Numb: Selected Poems, 1992-2019 (2019, Venetian Spider Press) and Loss and Foundering (2018, NightBallet Press). He hosts the monthly Poetry+ reading series at Art on Madison in Lakewood, Ohio, and has served since 2008 as the founding editor for Crisis Chronicles Press, publishing over one hundred books by esteemed writers from around the world. Find him on Facebook, Twitter (@jesuscrisis) or at www.crisischronicles.com.

This event is free.