April is National Poetry Month! Join Saturday Night Special online for an evening of literary performance and open mic reading

Featuring: Dean Rader & Judy Halebsky

Theme: Fortune Cookie
(scroll down for writing prompt)

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

Saturday April 27, 2024
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

Online Event
Free Admission

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The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt

SNS Open Mic Sign Up

Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 856 5388 5137

Passcode: 852089

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Author Bios

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored twelve books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was published in April of 2023 and was named one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry by Book Riot. His writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the MacDowell Foundation. Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
Learn more at deanrader.com

Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections—Sky=Empty, Tree Line,and Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)—and the chapbook Space/Gap/Interval/Distance. Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she holds an M.F.A. in English & Creative Writing from Mills College and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis. On fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Culture, she spent five years living in Japan, where she trained in Butoh dance and Noh theatre. She now directs the low-residency MFA program at Dominican University of California.
Learn more at judyhalebsky.com

Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!

messy ribbons of color in blues, green, yellow, orange, on pink background with The Write-In with Hollie Hardy repeated on each and the date 4/20 — LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, April 20, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.
Write-In Details/ Sign Up

April Writing Prompt: Fortune Cookie

April is National Poetry Month and many of us are endeavoring to write a poem every day for 30 days! (Some of you are enrolled in my Poetry Challenge getting fresh prompts for inspiration) Let’s have a little fortune cookie fun [in bed]:

Write a poem (or short prose piece) inspired by the fortune cookie.

INCLUDE ONE (OR MORE) OF THE FOLLOWING:

Adages
Warnings / Predictions
Tips / Advice / Instructions
The words "in bed" at the end of each line or stanza (or some other repeated phrase)
Confident, assertive, didactic, sarcastic or matter-of-fact tone
Interpolated lines from a fortune cookie
[Brackets] with fortune inside
Made up fortunes (serious or ridiculous)
Mention of a real or metaphorical fortune cookie
Second person address (to the reader, as "you")
A meal eaten alone or with someone else, which includes a fortune cookie
(and perhaps some setting or narrative details)