SNS | 6-27-26
Join us online for an evening of literary performance and open mic readings
Featuring:
Tracy Artson
Maw Shein Win
Theme: Exposure
(scroll down for writing prompt)
Hosted By: Hollie Hardy
Saturday, June 27, 2026
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
Join Event on Zoom
Meeting ID: 893 3525 8474
Passcode: 079689
Author Bios
Tracy Artson is a poet and licensed psychologist in California. Her poems explore the human conditions of social justice, climate crises, immigration, queerness, grief and yearning. Published poems: Passionfruit Review, Colossus Press, The Los Angeles Press, River Heron Review, Pushcart nominated by the editors of River Heron Review: https://www.riverheronreview.com/awards. Ina Coolbrith Circle 98th Annual Spring Contest: First place in the category, Nature. Winner of Political Festival, 2026 (WildSound). She is currently working on a manuscript.
Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024) which was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry, and nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com
Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!
LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!
Join me the week before SNS, on THURSDAY afternoon, June 25, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.
Write-In Details/ Sign Up
June Writing Prompt: Exposure
This month’s theme carries a wide range of meanings. Exposure can be dangerous: prolonged exposure to the cold, the sun, radiation, toxins, disease, war. Exposure can be voluntary or involuntary: a secret revealed, a body uncovered, a private thought made public. Exposure can be emotional—the risk of vulnerability, confession, intimacy, honesty.
Exposure has also become a kind of social currency. We live in a culture that encourages us to share, document, disclose, perform, and broadcast ourselves. Social media rewards visibility. We curate versions of our lives for public consumption, choosing what to reveal and what to conceal. Yet exposure can bring connection as easily as scrutiny, misunderstanding, judgment, or loss of privacy.
Photography offers another way into the theme. Exposure refers to the amount of light allowed into a camera. A brief exposure freezes a moment. A long exposure records time itself, blurring motion into ghostly traces. A double exposure layers two images atop one another, allowing multiple realities to occupy the same frame.
Exposure can also describe an encounter with the natural world. Think of northern skies illuminated by the aurora borealis, landscapes shaped by wind and weather, or moments when the world reveals something extraordinary to those willing to stand outside and witness it.
For this month's Saturday Night Special, write a poem that engages with the idea of exposure in any of its forms: physical, emotional, social, environmental, photographic, or metaphorical. Consider what is revealed, what is concealed, and what happens when boundaries between the two begin to blur.
SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:
Some Ideas for Getting Started
Write about a time you were exposed to something dangerous, beautiful, transformative, or unexpected.
Explore a personal vulnerability. What have you hidden, protected, or kept private? What might happen if it were brought into the light?
Write about public exposure in the digital age. Consider social media, surveillance, online identities, personal branding, oversharing, anonymity, viral attention, or the pressure to remain visible.
Use photography as a central metaphor. Think about focus, framing, negatives, flash, long exposures, overexposure, underexposure, or what remains outside the frame.
Write a poem in which two versions of yourself occupy the same space, creating a kind of double exposure between past and present, public and private, real and imagined.
Create a formal double-exposure poem by layering language from two different sources. You might alternate lines from two texts, weave fragments together, or allow two voices, narratives, memories, or documents to overlap and create unexpected meanings.
Consider environmental exposure. Write about prolonged contact with weather, landscape, climate, pollution, illness, grief, love, work, or any force that changes us through repeated contact.
Begin with an encounter with the aurora borealis, a meteor shower, an eclipse, or another natural phenomenon that feels like a revelation. Let the poem explore what becomes visible in that moment.
Write about public nudity—being naked in public, or witnessing public nudity. Think: Burning Man, a nude beach, a strip club, a naked motorcycle ride, a flasher in a trench coat, sex in the forest.
As ever, the theme is optional — an invitation, not a requirement; feel free to interpret loosely or ignore.
INSPIRATION
Self-Portrait as Cindy Sherman’s Instagram Account By Elizabeth Knapp
Indecent Exposure By Judith Moffett
Exposure By Robin Robertson
Timed Exposure By George Bilgere
Time Exposure By Josephine Jacobsen
from Double Exposures By Greg Williamson
On PrEP or on Prayer [“when i say pre-exposure prophylaxis”] By sam sax
Exposure By Wilfred Owen
Zion, Vernacular Exposure, Mockingbird Song By R. T. Smith
Double Exposure by May Swenson