The Word Works and The Writer’s Center present poets Melanie Figg and Hailey Leithauser. Café Muse opens at 7pm with refreshments and classical guitar by Michael Davis; readings begin at 7:30. Open Mic to follow.
MELANIE FIGG is the author of Trace (New River Press, 2019), winner of the Many Voices Project contest, and the chapbook, Hurry, Love, a collaboration with paper artist Doug Abbott. She is the recipient of a 2017-2019 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, in addition to grants from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. Her work has been anthologized and appears in many journals, including the Iowa Review, Nimrod, Quarterly West, and the Colorado Review. Her poem, “Leaving a Trace,” winner of the 2018 Iron Horse Literary Review Trifecta, was issued as an e-single. An award-winning teacher and coach, she teaches writing at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, as well as in private homes.
HAILEY LEITHAUSER’s most recent book of poetry is Saint Worm (Able Muse Press, 2019). Her debut collection, Swoop (Graywolf 2013) won the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award and the Towson Prize for Literature. Her poems appear, among numerous other journals, in Agni, the Antioch Review, the Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and the Yale Review. They have been selected three times for The Best American Poetry anthology. She is a recipient of The Discovery/The Nation Prize, The River Styx International Poetry Award, The Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award, and two Individual Artist Grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. Hailey Leithauser lives a few miles north of Washington, DC, and teaches at the West Chester Poetry Conference, West Chester, PA.