Charlotte Lit’s Poetry Nightclub is fun way to engage with the world’s oldest form of storytelling. Featuring acclaimed poets from across the nation, each event is a unique and compelling experience that goes beyond traditional reading and book signing events.
Upcoming
Tyree Daye
Poetry Nightclub
Date: Friday, April 25, 2025
Time: 6:00–8:00 pm
Location: Independent Picture House, 4237 Raleigh Street, Charlotte, NC 28213
Master Class: From my heart through my breath into a line: Breath as meaning in poetry
Date: Friday, April 25, 2025
Time: 6:00–8:00 pm
Location: Charlotte Lit, 601 E. 5th Street, Charlotte, NC 28202
Tyree Daye is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and River Hymns (American Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Kate Tufts Award finalist, and a 2021 Paterson Prize finalist. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an Amy Clampitt Residency. Daye is Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Previous
Danusha Laméris
Date: Friday, September 27, 2024
Time: 6:00–8:00 pm
Location: Theater Charlotte, 501 Queens Road, Charlotte 28207
Danusha Laméris is a poet and essayist raised in Northern California and born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Her first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. She’s also the author of Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award. A Pushcart Prize recipient, some of her work has been published in The Best American Poetry, The Sun, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and Orion. Winner of the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, she is on the faculty of Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA Program. Her third book is Blade by Blade (Copper Canyon Press, 2024).
And with special guest:
AE Hines is the author of Adam in the Garden (Charlotte Lit Press, 2024) and Any Dumb Animal (Main Street Rag, 2021). He has won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize and Palette Poetry’s Love and Eros Prize, and has been a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. His poems have been widely published in such journals as The Southern Review, Rattle, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, New Letters and Alaska Quarterly. His literary criticism can be found in American Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Rain Taxi, and Northwest Review. He received his MFA from Pacific University, and resides in Charlotte and Medellín, Colombia.
Tickets are $25 and include your first drink. (Non-alcohol-drinking and under-21 tickets available for $15.)
Jessica Jacobs & Rose McLarney
Date: Thursday, May 16, 2024
Time: 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Location: Starlight on 22nd, NoDa
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards and one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Collections of the Year, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/ Penguin RandomHouse), which she co-authored with Nickole Brown. She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah, a national nonprofit literary organization for Jewish poets. unalone, her collection of poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2024. She lives in Asheville, NC.
Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Poets, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She is co-editor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American. Currently, she is Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.
Tickets for this Poetry Nightclub are free!
Mary Szybist
Date: Friday, March 22, 2024
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Location: Starlight on 22nd, NoDa
Mary Szybist is the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. She the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her first book, Granted, won the 2004 GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A native of Williamsport, PA, she now lives in Portland, OR, where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.
Tickets are $25 and includes your first drink. (Under 21 tickets also available for $15.)
Sandra Beasley
Date: Friday, December 1, 2023
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Location: Starlight on 22nd, NoDa
Sandra Beasley — who first visited Charlotte Lit as the second 4X4CLT poet in 2016 — is the author of Made to Explode, winner of the Housatonic Book Award; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. In spring 2023, she was Davidson College’s McGee Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Date: Thursday, June 22, 2023
Time: 6:30 – 9:00 pm
Location: Starlight on 22nd, NoDa
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Date: Thursday, March 30, 2023
Time: 6:30 – 9:00 pm
Location: Starlight on 22nd, NoDa
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of a book of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which was named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and four award-winning poetry collections, most recently, Oceanic (2018). Awards for her writing include fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Erin Belieu
Date: Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Time: 6:30 – 9:00 pm
Location: Starlight on 22nd, NoDa
Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including 2021’s Come-Hither Honeycomb. A Rona Jaffe Fellow and recent winner of the AWP George Garett prize, her poems have appeared in places such as The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, Atlantic Monthly and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, and have been selected for multiple appearances in the Best American Poetry anthology series. Born and raised in Omaha, NE, Belieu now lives in Houston, where she teaches in the University of Houston’s MFA/Ph.D. creative writing program.
Chen Chen
Date: Wednesday, November 9, 2022
Time: 6:30 – 9:00 pm
Location: Starlight on 22nd, NoDa
Chen Chen’s second book, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in September 2022. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.
