The Milwaukie Poetry Series is delighted to invite you to July’s rescheduled First Friday poetry readings for the Summer Season through October! Please join us at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church which is located at 2036 SE Jefferson St., Milwaukie, OR 97222.

Featured readers will be the first and second place winners of the 2024 Clackamas County Arts Alliance Literary Committee’s 2nd Annual Writing Contest: Megan Jones in poetry, Carina Cooper in short story and playlet, and guest reader Joan Freed for Leslie Hayertz’s playlet. They will read for approximately 40 minutes.

We will then have the Open Mic. Anyone who would like to participate in the Open Mic is welcome, however we will not be taking readers over Zoom. For this event we will expand the Open Mic to short story and playlet since the Featured Readers will be reading those forms. There would be a 5 min. limit for short story and playlet and two poems for the poets.  Please indicate if you want  to read during the Open Mic by emailing Tom Hogan.

Can’t make it to the event in person? No worries. Join us on Zoom! To receive the link, register here.

Remember, you can forward this email to anyone that you feel might have an interest in attending our reading in person or via Zoom. To do so, tap or click the email icon below.

Thank you for your continued support!

Meg Jones lives in Oak Grove with her wife and three pets. She is lucky to have her dream job teaching math, social studies, and poetry at an alternative high school in Oregon City. Meg couldn’t stand the poetry she had to read in school, but after graduating, she discovered modern work and realized she likes poetry after all! Meg’s work has appeared in a variety of print and online journals and she is currently working on her first book-length manuscript.

Carina Cooper is a nontraditional student attending art and writing courses at Clackamas Community College. Her story Behavioral Health won an award from the Clackamas Arts Alliance in 2024. Like her fiction, she also has two sons, now adults, the youngest has autism. She connects people through stories of hope and hardship in an effort to garner understanding and empathy for others from her readers. She is driven to create more compassion in the world. Carina lives in Milwaukie with her husband and their two cats.

Leslie Hayertz is an author of fiction and short plays. Her plays have won the Clackamas County Arts Alliance Writing Contest, and others have had staged readings and a production. She lives near the confluence of the Tualatin and Willamette Rivers.