The Mad Poets Blog

Join us Thursday night for another great mixed-genre reading at Milkboy Acoustic Cafe in Bryn Mawr, where we’ll feature poets Katherine Bode-Lang and Cliff Lynn along with essayist Krista Eastman. Bring your own poems to participate in the open mic that will followed the featured readings, and you could get a shot for a featured reading slot of your own later this year. The festivities begin at 7pm.

Here’s a bit about our readers….

Poet Katherine Bode-Lang

Katherine Bode-Lang’s chapbook, Spring Melt, was chosen by G.C. Waldrep as the second place winner in the 2008 Keystone Chapbook Contest and was published last May by Seven Kitchens Press.  Her poems have appeared in Subtropics, The Mid-American Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others.  She was an Editor’s Choice for The Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award in 2007 and 2008, and she received Academy of American Poets Prizes three times from Penn State and Hope College.  Katherine holds an MFA from Penn State University and lives in Bellefonte, PA, with her husband, Andrew.

Krista Eastman was born and raised in the hills of Wisconsin. A couple of seconds ago, she completed her MFA in Women’s Studies and Creative Writing at Penn State. Her literary essays about travel, place, and gender are collected in a new manuscript entitled Some Other Sun, and her writing appears or has appeared in New Letters, Witness, The Massachusetts Review and others.

Poet Cliff Lynn

Like most other poets, Cliff Lynn auditioned for, and was rejected by, the Gong Show at an early age.  Cliff was the 2006 editor-in-chief of the Anne Arundel Community College Literary Journal Amaranth.  With multimedia poet Rocky Jones, he has hosted monthly poetry readings since 2005, bringing great poets (established and up-and-coming) to Annapolis, MD, while providing the local poetry community a safe and nurturing environment to share their work. Cliff is establishing a poetry series in Birdie’s, a new Westminster, MD coffee shop.  An award-winning poet, he has over 35 poems and short stories published in small-press journals such as Free Lunch, Fledgling Rag and Grub Street, and is the inaugural featured author on the Baltimore-based journal “Scribble”’s website. Cliff was a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2010 Poetry Out Loud Maryland Regional semi-finals, and for Delaware County, PA High Schools 2010 Poetry Competition.  Half of the inaugural featured poets for M.S. Sanders’ !Speak Your Piece! reading series in Baltimore (a series which is the literary equivalent of an orgasm), he has read poetry throughout Maryland, as well as in Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Texas, Washington, California and Vegas.  Cliff has taken poetry into colleges, high schools, middle schools and elementary schools, and is the Tuscarora High School’s Poet-in-Residence in Frederick, MD, a post he has held since 2007.  They won’t let him live there, however.