We offer free, live, online poetry readings every third Tuesday of each month at 8 pm.

On odd months, KSPS members have a chance to read their own work at our Open Mic. On even months, we feature one KSPS member or KSPS ally.

January 17: Open Mic

Open Mic featuring KSPS members. Audience is open to the public!

Sign-up has closed.

February 21: Bernard Clay

Kentucky native Bernard Clay grew up in the now demolished Southwick housing projects in Louisville’s “West End”. He has spent years developing a deep appreciation of the state’s unique natural and urban areas. Bernard earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky Creative Writing Program and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective. His work can be found in various journals and anthologies. He currently lives on Scorpion Hollow Farm in eastern Kentucky with his herbalist partner Lauren, founder of Resilient Roots, where he homesteads and continues writing. English Lit is his first book.

March 21: Open Mic

Open Mic featuring KSPS members. Audience is open to the public!

Sign-up has closed.

April 25: Joy Priest
(rescheduled from April 18)

Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and The Atlantic, among others, as well as in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated. Priest received her MFA in poetry with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. She has facilitated poetry workshops with incarcerated juvenile and adult women, and has taught creative writing, comedy, gender & sexuality, and African American Arts & Culture at the university level. Joy is an Inprint MD Anderson Foundation Fellow and a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She is currently editing an anthology of Louisville poets for Sarabande Books.