Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery (located on 106 Prospect Street in Cambridge) with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On January 7th, local open miker will have his first feature at Stone Soup.
Sam Cha was born in Seoul in 1978 . He grew up in, variously, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Seoul. He majored in English at Williams College, and graduated in 2001. He received his MA in English from Rutgers in 2005. He's been around. He likes to drink coffee and whiskey, most of the time separately. He likes the kind of pie that has a rope ladder hidden inside, and he puts hot sauce on everything, or almost everything, coffee and whiskey being two of the only exceptions. He smokes too much. He reads a lot: Pynchon, McCarthy, Twain, Borges and Nabokov are some of his favorites. He writes a lot, but less than he'd like to write.
He wrote a lot of bad poetry in college, and thankfully most of it remains buried on his hard drive. Some of it still exists on paper in various Williams College literary magazines, most of which are now defunct. One of those poems somehow got second place for the Bullock Poetry Prize of the American Academy of Poets at his school for 1999. He moved to Boston early in 2007, and has been attending open mic poetry nights since June or so. Although he's a novelist at heart, he writes poetry right now because it's easier to read in the time slots available. One of the poems he wrote this year was a finalist for the Anderbo Poetry Prize. He wants to write words that move like steel in a knife fight. He wants to write words that draw blood.
Click here to read "New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down," Sam Cha's finalist poem for the Anderbo Poetry Prize.
