The Word Works and The Writer’s Center feature poets Joanne Rocky Delaplaine and Reuben Jackson. Café Muse opens at 7pm with refreshments and classical guitar by Michael Davis; readings begin at 7:30. Poetry open mic to follow.
All Café Muse programs are free to the public and handicapped accessible.
JOANNE ROCKY DELAPLAINE is an award-winning poet whose debut collection is The Local World (Word Tech Editions, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree, International Literary Quarterly, The Northern Virginia Review, Potomac Review, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. Her poems have won Best of the Net (2015), first place in the Bethesda Literary Festival Poetry Contest (2014), and first place in The Northern Virginia Review contest (2013). She is a Maryland native and has co-directed the Café Muse reading series for several years.
REUBEN JACKSON is the author of fingering the keys (Gut Punch Press, 1991), winner of the 1992 Columbia Book Award, and Scattered Clouds (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019). He served as curator of the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection in Washington, DC, taught at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and hosted Friday Night Jazz for Vermont Public Radio. He is currently a mentor with The Young Writers Project, an archivist at the University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives, and a librettist with the New Music-Theatre workshop, which he co-founded. His music reviews appear in numerous media outlets, and his poetry has been widely anthologized. He lives in Hyattsville, MD.