BELLOWS FALLS — Village Square Booksellers will host a 2nd Saturday Open Mic on Saturday, Dec. 9 at 1 p.m., followed by a reading by Pat Fargnoli and Tim Mayo.
The Open Mic features poets taking turns reading from their works. The poets sit around a table, so there is no need for newbie poetry readers to be nervous about standing in front of a room.
Patricia Fargnoli, from Walpole, N.H., was the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from 2006-2009. She has published five books and three chapbooks of poetry and has won The May Swenson Book Award, the Foreword Magazine Silver Book of the Year Award, the NH Literary Award for Poetry and the Sheila Mooton Book Award.
Her latest book is Hallowed: New and Selected Poems (Tupelo Press, 2017), and she has published more than 300 poems in various literary journals. A Macdowell Fellow and retired social worker, she now teaches poetry privately.
Tim Mayo is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: The Kingdom of Possibilities (Mayapple Press, 2009) and Thesaurus of Separation (Phoenicia Publishing, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Montaigne Medal and a 2017 poetry category finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award.
He is a six-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, twice a finalist for the Paumanok Award, and the recipient of two Vermont Writers Fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center. He lives in Brattleboro, where he was a founding member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival and currently works at The Brattleboro Retreat.