Caffe Lena Poetry Open Mic Featuring Nicola Marae Allain & Charlie Rossiter

This monthly event, hosted by Carol Graser, takes place on the first Wednesday of every month and includes an open mic reading as well as featured poets. Sign up for the open mic starts at 7:00 and readings start at 7:30. September’s featured poets are Charlie Rossiter and Nicola Marae Allain. Nicola Marae Allain is an associate professor in arts and media at SUNY Empire State College. Raised in Tahiti, French Polynesia, she grew up to the rhythms of primal ancestral drums, senses heightened by the perfume of gardenias and the scent of the sea. Her performances and creative works have been featured at arts, dance, music, cultural and storytelling festivals in the United States and Mexico. She shares stories from her Polynesian ancestry and rich family history in narrative memoir poems. In 2016 Univocal Publishing published Didactic Poetries, Nicola’s translation of the seminal work by the contemporary French poet Philippe Beck. Charlie Rossiter, a member of “3 Guys from Albany” performance poetry group, hosts the twice-monthly podcast series at www.poetryspokenhere.com. While living in Delmar back in the ‘90s he produced and hosted the Poetry Motel cable tv program. Now, after a stint in the Chicago area, he has returned east to Bennington, VT. He’s read at venues nation-wide, including the Dodge Festival in NJ, the Chicago Blues Festival, and Nuyorican Poets Café in NYC. Recent books include: All Over America: Road Poems; Winter Poems; Cold Mountain 2000: Han Shan in the City; and Lakeside Poems. His newspaper column “Waxing Poetic” appears occasionally in the Bennington Banner