February 27th: Zeke Russell Features



Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On February 27th, we are treated to the return of past feature and new resident of the Boston area from Lowell, Zeke Russell.

Zeke Russell grew up in an artist’s community in Central Maine surrounded by poets playwrights and lumberjacks. He has been writing poetry since the age of 8. He is the co-host and slam master of the Untitled at Brew’d open mic and slam in Lowell MA, on the first and third Tuesdays of each month. He is the reigning grand slam champion of that venue and a member of its 2011 national poetry slam competition team. He lives in Jamaica Plain with PJ the wonder pug, drinks too much coffee and usually needs a haircut.

February 20th: Janet Marks Features



Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On February 20th, we welcome Janet Marks.

Janet Marks was born in in a small town called Brady in Central West Texas. Her parents were immigrants from Lithuania and Poland. Growing up in Houston during The Depression, she was unable to attend college. After High School, she worked as a secretary and bookkeeper, married, raised three wonderful children, and found time to attend the University of Houston part-time as they were growing up. She had started writing bad poetry in Junior High School, which was published in the school paper. One summer she attended a Writer’s Conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, which whetted her appetite for poetry. She started writing poetry seriously and published poems in her college journals and in many little magazines. In 1972, at 52 years of age, she finally earned a BA with honors in English.

As an undergraduate among so many young people, she had the feeling of living a second childhood! After a divorce when her children were mostly grown, she moved to California, earning an MA in Creative Writing and English from San Francisco State University. As a teacher of English, she worked at Paine College, Augusta, Georgia; the University of Houston; and the University of San Francisco, also teaching ESL for the Marin Community College and the San Francisco Community College District.

As runner-up for the Frances Shaw Fellowship For Older Women Writers, she was in residence at Ragdale, an arts colony, for a month, won several awards for poems on the Jewish experience from the Rosenberg Awards, sponsored by the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley. Some of her poems have been published in New England Review, Mississippi Review, Forum, Latitudes, South and West, Mediphors, Passager, and in the following anthologies: Bittersweet Legacy, Creative Responses to the Holocaust, Travois, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, and Poets on Parnassus, San Francisco.

Visit the Stone Soup website for information on future features and more http://stonesouppoetry.blogspot.com/

February 13th: David Miller Features



Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On February 13th, we continue featuring new talent with the debut feature of David Miller.

David P. Miller began writing poetry at 52, in 2007. This leaves aside the political doggerel he composed in high school. His work has been seen in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and his booklet, Caution: Many People Walking is available from the Origami Poems Project. He was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years. He is a librarian at Curry College, in Milton, Mass., and is active in the Curry faculty creative writing group.

Tonight

Michael F. Gill presents Laura Brown-Lavoie & Antonia Lassar at Stone Soup.

Tonight

Welcome Owen Maresh.

February 6th: Laura Brown-Lavoie & Antonia Lassar Feature



Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. Stone Soup kicks off February with the first Boston-area features from poets Laura Brown-Lavoie and Antonia Lassar! Laura will be doing a full feature, and Antonia will be on hand for a spotlight feature.

Hosted by Michael F. Gill. There will be an open mic featuring live jazz piano by Michael Monroe. $3 suggested donation to help cover our rent at the Out of the Blue Art gallery.

Laura Brown-Lavoie is a spoken word poet from Providence, RI. A newcomer to the national slam scene, she was the 2011 Providence Grand Slam Champion and had the opportunity to perform on finals stage at the National Poetry Slam, where she and her Providence teammates took 3rd place. When she isn't writing, Laura works as an urban farmer, growing food on vacant lots across Providence. While much of her poetry is inspired by her interactions with the urban natural environment, she also writes to interrogate the use of language in politics and the mainstream media, and, of course, to figure out where the heck she is in all of this. She is committed to spoken word performance as a means of fostering creative community in a culture where too often people are isolated from one another in favor of glowing screens. Her mom is a high school English teacher, and her dad is a storyteller, and she takes any opportunity she can to be in rooms full of people where beautiful things are being said out loud. Oh, and Laura fuckin loves public libraries.

Antonia Lassar is thrilled to see you! Antonia’s home lies somewhere between Boston, Massachusetts and everywhere else. She has studied Theatre Arts at both Boston University and the University of Cape Town. Four years ago, Antonia would have called you crazier than Charlie Sheen if you threatened she would become a poet, but thanks to some brilliant mentoring from Boston and beyond, she hopes one day to become a famous poet/ actress/ activist/ vegan. She has performed at UCT’s Hiddingh campus, at The Boston Playwright’s Theatre, and in Las Vegas as the 2008 national high school speech and debate Storytelling champion. Antonia is constantly thanking her family, (You know in my head, because phone calls are expensive. Yes mom, I’m doing fine…) particularly for their rare breed of crazy that has shaped her as a poet and is an endless source of hilarity to write about.

January 30th: Owen Maresh Features



Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On January 30th, we close out January with the debut poetry feature of Owen Maresh.

Owen Maresh is a mathematics artist living near Inman Square. He likes visualization and is leery of endless towers of abstraction. He describes his creative writing style as "a chiaroscuro of eroded bananas, or a conglomeration of malfunctioning robotic bees". At present, he is working on finding methods of visualizing funky quasiconformal automorphisms of Julia sets.

Tonight

Martha Boss Features.

Tonight

Dennis Daly features!