The Brooklyn Poets Friday Night Open begins with an open mic and culminates in readings by two featured poets. Guests can purchase tickets to attend in person at 144 Montague Street or virtually via Zoom (note: virtual guests cannot read for the open mic).
6:00 PM: open mic signup begins
6:30 to 7:45 PM: open mic
8 to 8:30 PM: featured readers
Each reader for the open mic can read for up to a four-minute set. Participants can purchase one of eight tickets in advance to reserve an open mic spot. Once those tickets sell out, all other participants who’d like to read for the open mic can purchase a ticket to sign up at the door on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will be time for about 16–18 readers.
Advance online ticket sales end at 4 PM on the day of the event. After that, tickets for in-person attendance can be purchased at the door until we reach capacity; tickets for virtual attendance will no longer be available. After 4 PM, a Zoom link will be emailed to virtual ticket holders. Participants are encouraged to purchase tickets in advance for in-person attendance, as there are limited seats. Brooklyn Poets members take $5 off.
Note that by participating in the Friday Night Open, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy. All in-person attendees are currently required to wear masks (regardless of vaccination status) except readers at a safe distance on stage. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.
Closed captions will be available for the event through the Zoom livestream. For more information and to request additional accommodations, contact us.
Next Friday Night Open: April 21
Featured poets: SK Rancy and dawn lonsinger
SK Rancy is a writer born to Haitian immigrants in South Florida and currently based in New York. He earned a dual BA in English / comparative literature and biology at Columbia University. He has been longlisted for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and named a finalist for Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ24 Open Poetry Prize, and his work is published or forthcoming in Columbia New Poetry, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Ars Medica, Apogee, the Seventh Wave, Moko, the Adirondack Review, Porridge and Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language and Culture. His novel-in-progress Beyond the Baths of Stars was a semi-finalist for the Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press and a two-time finalist in the Publishing Laboratory Contest at the University of New Orleans. His debut full-length poetry collection Dreams of Diaspora was released March 2023 with Finishing Line Press, and his poetry chapbook Self-Portrait in Hospital as Camus is out with Diode Editions April 2023. In his spare time, he is a surgical resident.
dawn lonsinger is the author of Whelm— winner of the Idaho Prize in Poetry, Cornell’s Freund Prize, and a Shelf Unbound Notable Book of the Year. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Guernica, Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. Lyric essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review. She is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. She has also won the Scowcroft Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards and four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. lonsinger holds a BA in studio art and English as well as an MA in literature from Bucknell University, an MFA in poetry from Cornell University and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. She is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at Muhlenberg College, where she was recently awarded the the Paul C. Empie ’29 Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching.