The National Writers Union will be hosting a reading and open mic on Monday, March 18, starting at 6:00 p.m. in Tucson. This month, Michael Gregory will be the featured reader. Michael was a co-founder of the Bisbee Poetry Festival and the Bisbee Press Collective which published work by a number of members and others during the 1970s and early 80s, as well as the founder and long-time director of the Central School Project community arts center Bisbee. Michael’s poetry has appeared widely in periodicals and anthologies over the past fifty years, and in several small press books and chapbooks, including handset letterpress productions from his own Mother Duck Press. His most recent book is Mr America Drives His Car (Post-Soviet Depression Press, 2013), a selection of his work from 1975-2011. Later this year, Red Dragonfly Press will publish Pound Laundry, an extended meditation on, and verse genealogy of, Ezra Pound (often considered the father of literary modernism), which Michael has been working on for the past twenty years. Since 1971, he has lived off-grid, ten miles from the US-Mexico border in the Sulphur Springs Valley of southeast Arizona where he raises organic pears and apples.

The open mic is for spoken word only, but is open to all forms of spoken word (fiction, essays, poetry, articles, polemics, etc.). So bring something to read!

The event will be held at the AFSCME/SEIU Union Hall at 877 S. Alvernon Way in Tucson. The building is on the east side of the street (opposite the Randolph Park golf range) and is a couple of blocks north of 22nd Street. There is ample parking. The room is on the first floor and we will have signs up to point the way.