Buffalo Area Poetry & Literature Calendar (week of Feb. 18-Feb. 24)

Tuesday, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.: Open mic at Cucina, a restaurant inside The Richardson Hotel. Sara Ali and Meg Specksgoor are the co-hosts of this weekly series featuring poetry, music and  comedy. The Richardson Hotel, 444 Forest Ave, Buffalo. Register with the venue via jkonze@douglasdev.com

Wednesday, 7:30 p.m.: The Screening Room Reading Series hosted by poet Sandy Geary. Featured reader this month is John Wilcox. Open mic reading slots available. The Screening Room Cinema Café, 880 Alberta  Drive, Amherst. $3. 

Wednesday, 9 p.m.: Poetry Night at Caffe Aroma, biweekly open mic reading series hosted by Ben Brindise and Justin Karcher. 957 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo.

Thursday, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.: BUFFALO, BOOKS & BEER (B3), the popular barroom reading series, will make its long-awaited return with award-winning author Matt Gallagher making his Buffalo debut to discuss his new novel DAYBREAK (Atria Books), a timely and important novel about the war in Ukraine. Gallagher is a U.S. Army veteran and the author of four books, including the novels YOUNGBLOOD and EMPIRE CITY. His writing has appeared in Esquire, ESPN, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Wired. Ukrainian-American Civic Center (Narodnij Dim), 205 Military Road, Buffalo.

Friday, 6 p.m. to   8 p.m.: Fourth Friday Reading Series Poetry at Dog Ears Books, hosted by Tim Joyce. This month featured reader is poet Lynn Ciesielski. Additional reading slots available. $5 donation goes to Dog Ears Foundation. Dog Ears Books and Cafe, 688 Abbott Road, Buffalo.

Friday, 7 p.m.: Just Buffalo Literary Center presents an evening of readings featuring poets Tracy Fuad, Julianne Neely, and Spencer Williams. Books by all three poets will be available for purchase from Fitz Books.

Tracy Fuad’s second book of poetry, PORTAL, won the Phoenix Emerging Poets Prize. She was a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and lives in Berlin, where she teaches poetry and directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.

Julianne Neely received her MFA degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship, the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize, and a Schupes Fellowship for Poetry. She is currently a Poetics PhD student and an English Department Fellow at the University at Buffalo. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, VIDA, The Poetry Project, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review and more. She has three chapbooks out with Slope Editions, garden-door Press, and Foundlings Press and a forthcoming digital chapbook from Megatron Press.

Spencer Williams is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review, 2017) and the forthcoming collection TRANZ (Four Way Books 2024). Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, IndieWire, Polygon, and Poets.org. She is currently a PhD student in poetics at SUNY, Buffalo.

Just Buffalo Literary Center, 468 Washington St., 2nd Floor, Buffalo. Free and open to the public.