Jenny Keith, Barrett Warner & Bruce Jacobs, Featured Poets

Jenny Keith & Barrett Warner, plus special guest poet Bruce Jacobs, will be the featured poets for !SPEAK YOUR PIECE! http://www.speakyourpiece1.weebly.com on Wednesday, September 22, 2010. This weekly, featured poet and open mic poetry event takes place every Wednesday night at Singer’s Bar & Restaurant in Mount Vernon, 227 West Chase Street. The event will be preceded by an open mic. Sign-up for the open mic will begin at 6:30 pm. This event is free and open to the public.

Jenny Keith is a poet, copywriter, and fiction writer. She attended the University of Virginia and graduated from the American University in Washington, D.C. where she studied with Henry Taylor and Linda Pastan. She has published two chapbooks of poetry: Wonderland by Night (Shattered Wig) and Sleepwalk (Tropos). She has read at many venues in the Baltimore and Washington D.C. area, including recent collaborative poetry performances with the band Boister. Her poems have appeared in City Paper, The Pearl, Sewanee Theological Review and The Nebraska Review, and she recently completed a new manuscript of formalist poems. Keith lives in Baltimore, Maryland where she collects estate tea and plays rhythm guitar with Plastic Magi, a psychedelic garage band.

Barrett Warner was born in Westminster, MD in 1962. Barrett's work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Comstock Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, California Quarterly, Gargoyle and City Paper, among others. An under graduate at the College of William and Mary, he also received a fellowship from George Washington University to work with Writer-In-Residence Linda McCarriston. Barrett's fiction has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times and his poetry chapbook Til I'm Blue in the Face was published in 1995 by Tropos Press in Baltimore. In 2007 his paper Silvia Plath: The Consolation of Desolation was presented to the Warren Shakespeare Club. He has also been the recipient of an American Quarterhorse Association grant to write poems about running Quarterhorses in Idaho. In addition to writing, Barrett is a licensed race horse trainer on the Mid-Atlantic racing circuit where he mostly gets kicked for a living. Barrett lives on a small farm with his wife Julia, two dogs and thirty or so half-broke very slow horses.

Bruce A. Jacobs is a poet, author, and musician. His books of poems are Cathode Ray Blues (Tropos Press) and Speaking Through My Skin (MSU Press), which won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize. He has been published in a slew of poetry journals and anthologies, including 180 More, edited by former national Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and Beyond The Frontier, edited by E. Ethelbert Miller. He has won poetry slams in Baltimore and at New York's Nuyorican Poetry Cafe. He is also the author of the nonfiction book Race Manners for the 21st Century, and he travels and speaks about race. He is a longtime drummer, a slowly improving saxophonist, and a blogger at aliasbruce.typepad.com. He lives in Baltimore.

!SPEAK YOUR PIECE! is hosted and organized by award-winning poet, performer & actor, M. S. Sanders. This event is presented by Singer’s Bar & Restaurant and Concurrence Multimedia.

Singer’s Bar & Restaurant is a boutique restaurant and bar with a focus on current music, comedy, spoken word, independent film and other forms of entertainment in the heart of the cultural district of Baltimore. Singer’s hosts nightly events spotlighting some of the best established performers and upcoming talent from local notables to out of state imports.