Caffe Lena Poetry Night Featuring Jackie Craven, Ian Macks, and Richard Levine

The Caffe Lena Poetry Night, hosted by Carol Graser, returns on Wednesday, July 7 at 7 PM with featured readers Jackie Craven, Ian Macks, and Richard Levine.

For those of you that can’t attend in person, the Caffe Lena Poetry Night Live Stream is recorded in the listening room and broadcast live for the community to enjoy. Go to www.CaffeLena.org and click the red box for “Watch Our Live Stream”.

The virtual audience can donate to Poetry Night at any time during the reading. Any tips will be divided between the poets and Caffe Lena. Or click the link above to lend your support to Caffe Lena whenever you want.

Jackie Craven has recent poems in many journals, including AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, and River Styx. She’s the author of Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters published by Brick Road Poetry Press in 2018, and a fiction chapbook, Our Lives Became Unmanageable, published by Omnidawn. Jackie lives in Schenectady and facilitates the Second Wednesday Writers Open Mic on Zoom.

Ian Macks, the author of A Loss and Gain of Comfort (Bottlecap Press 2014), is a 27-year-old poet based out of Troy, NY. Raised in the Bronx until the age of 10, Macks felt the actions and emotions of love, loss, racism, and hardship all while being non-verbal for half of that decade. This sensitive perspective on life is what fuels Ian’s poetry and that light shines brightly throughout his newest collection, Identity Crisis(recto y verso editions inc 2021).

Richard Levine’s Now in Contest is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.  A retired NYC teacher, he is also the author of Richard Levine: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2019), Contiguous States (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and five chapbooks.  He is an Associate Editor of BigCityLit.com.  His review “Poetry for a Pandemic,” appeared in American Book Review, Nov-Dec 2020, and the review “The Spoils of War” is forthcoming.  He served in Vietnam (1967-68, USMC).