Our exciting 1st Wednesday series continues with Open Mic, SLAM competition and feature performances from guest poet Michael Brown! To take part in the open mic or slam, please register between 6:30 and 7:00 pm.  Slam poets should bring at least one original poem of up to 3 minutes. Registration closes promptly at 7, and the program starts shortly thereafter. Co-hosted by local poet and slam-master Eric ZORK Alan.  All are welcome! Questions? Contact program librarian Ben Himmelfarb by phone (422-6980) or e-mail (). Poetry Slam is a project of the White Plains Library Foundation. Michael R. Brown was born in Philadelphia in the first half of the last century. He was raised in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, attended Scranton University, and began teaching high school in an all-black, all-girls high school. He taught for two years in Bucks County, then went to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in English and Education, which included a dissertation in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance directed by Robert Hayden. Thus began a professional life of teaching in five separate states. Meanwhile he has had five books of poetry published: Falling Wallendas, Tia Chucha (1994); The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides(Hanover Press), 2003;) Susquehanna (Ragged Sky, 2003); The Confidence Man (Ragged Sky, 2007). From 2008 until 2016, he and his wife Valerie Lawson put out Off the Coast, and international poetry quarterly. In 2017 they converted their work by establishing a book publishing enterprise, Resolute Bear Press, which published a book of his political poems, The Martin Bormann Dog Care Book and her 3 Nations
Anthology with writing from Canada, Native American people, and New Englanders. Meanwhile, Michael joined the slam poetry movement in Chicago and spread the phenomenon throughout New England. He and Patricia Smith established The Cantab (1992) in Cambridge, MA, carried the slam to Sweden, and led a US national championship team in 1993. With Erkki Lappalainen he organized the first Poetry Olympics in Stockholm in 1998. He also created Dr. Brown’s Traveling Poetry Show, a two-hour theater production.