April is Poetry Month!!!

In celebration of a genre of poetry that both prose writers and poets can joyfully practice, join us for “The Pleasures and Possibilities of the Prose Poem,” April 16, 7:00 p.m. with Michigan Writers on ZOOM.

Join writer-poets Fleda Brown and Kathleen McGookey for a lively reading and craft discussion of this alluring form that invigorates and energizes the practice of poetry. Prose-poetry has long attracted both prose writers and poets for its wondrous flexibility and genre-bending abilities. It’s fresh, fun and furiously lyrical in its breadth and suppleness. Fleda and Kathleen will read selections of their own prose poems, discuss why they choose the form, address what it offers writers that other forms may not, and share how they enter this practice of blurring the lines. Please join us to learn from these fine practitioners of the craft.

*Watch for a MW newsletter e-blast with the link a few days before the event. Don’t forget to check spam.
About the readers:

Kathleen McGookey has published five books and four chapbooks of prose poems, most recently Paper Sky (Press 53) and Cloud Reports (Celery City Chapbooks). Her work has appeared recently in journals including Copper Nickel, Epoch, Field, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. It has also been featured on American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily, and SWWIM Every Day. She lives in Middleville, Michigan, and loves to walk, ski, and bake pies.

Fleda Brown’s eleventh collection: The End of the Clockwork Universe (Carnegie Mellon U.P., 2025). Doctor of the World won the Finishing Line Press Chapbook Contest for 2024. The Woods Are on Fire is her New & Selected (U. of Nebraska Press, 2017). Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and a two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her recent memoir is Mortality, with Friends (Wayne State U.P., an MIPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir).