The Blue Hour reading includes a brief open mic followed by two featured poets from Chicago and beyond. The open mic includes five readers drawn lottery-style from a hat that goes out at 7:15. The reading starts promptly at 7:30. Each open mic poet reads one poem or for three minutes, whichever comes first.
The name comes from a line by Chicago poet Li-Young Lee, from a section of “The City in Which I Love You”: I wait in a blue hour and faraway noise of hammering, and on a page, a poem begun, something about to be dispersed, something about to come into being.
EVENT DETAILS FOR NOVEMBER 21:
- Workshop (registration required) begins promptly at 6 p.m., ends at 7 p.m.
- Open mic sign-up begins at 7:15.
- Reading (registration recommended but not required) begins at 7:30, followed by community gathering time.
- Reading registration is free; the workshop is a sliding scale with a suggested donation of $10.
- Register for the workshop here.
- Get your free ticket for the reading here.
- Livestream is available here.
Featured Readers
Monica Rico is CantoMundo Fellow and Macondista who grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. She is an MFA graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, winner of a Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award, a 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry finalist, and 2021 winner of the Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Kaveh Akbar. Monica is Program Manager & Editor-in-Chief for the Bear River Writers’ Conference.
Author of A Church Beneath the Bulldozer (New School Poetics, 2014), Kush Thompson (she/her) is a Chicago-born poet, painter, and educator. She creates archival art, often centering on girlhood and the mechanics of memory. Her work has been published in Poetry magazine, The Chicago Reader, and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015).
For several years, Kush served as an educator with Young Chicago Authors’ Teaching Artist Corps, debuting her portraiture series, Blk Hottie, in 2016. Voted runner-up best local poet of 2014 by The Chicago Reader and a 2015 Young Futurist by The Root, Thompson has performed and facilitated creative writing workshops both nationally and internationally. She is a Luminarts, Pink Door, and Cave Canem fellow.
As an organizer, Kush cocurated The Lady Church, a series of monthly workshops and annual showcases for women and femmes, and briefly served as organizing and chapter cochair of Black Youth Project 100 Chicago.