Registering for the open mic is required!  Signing up to read is first come, first served. You can add yourself to the reader's queue upon registration (below). 

Please join California Poets in the Schools for a community open mic at 7pm, Sunday, April 24th, in celebration of National Poetry Month.  We will hear poems from Maureen Hurley - Area Coordinator of Alameda County, and Kaiden Wilde, Poet-Teacher currently based in Northridge.  See bios below.  Following our featured readers, we'll open the floor to an open mic.

The event is part of a quarterly series of open mic events meant to foster community amongst our network, and to highlight our fantastic poets.  Each event will spotlight one or two poets from the CalPoets' network as featured readers, and an emcee (also from the network). On the 24th, our featured readers will launch the event with a 15 minute reading (each) and then we'll then transition into an open mic.  

• teens 14+ & adults welcome
• register online & join link will be sent before the event
• event will occur on Zoom
• event will not be livestreamed
• there will be time for 20 open mic readers, give or take
• each reader will have 3(ish) minutes to read or perform
• reader slots are first come, first served... If you are interested in reading, please note in the registration form.
• thanks for bringing poems that are fit for all ages 14+ 

Emcee:

Angelina Leaños is a student at California Lutheran University with the hopes to become a published author, as well as an English teacher. In high school, she won the Poetry Out Loud competition both at the school and county level and has since returned as a coach to other participants. Leaños has had several poems published and organizes a monthly poetry open mic with the Ventura County Arts Council in partnership with the Oxnard public library.  She is the newest board member at California Poets in the Schools and the current Youth Poet Laureate of Ventura County.

Featured Readers: 

Maureen Hurley: West Marin native who grew up on Coast Miwok lands, visual artist, and poet, Maureen Hurley, is California Poets in the Schools Alameda County area coordinator, and former board member. She teaches poetry

and art residencies in Bay Area schools, including Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley, and Alexander Valley where she has taught poetry to kids for more than 30 years. Recipient of numerous California Arts Council artist in schools grants, and other arts teaching grants and awards including nominations for the Golden Bell Award, and the Kawasaki Award. She has taught arts programming to students of all ages throughout California and beyond—including

Montana, the Bahamas, Mexico, and the former USSR.

Maureen Hurley is a photographer, and poet whose work has been widely published in print, and electronic anthologies, and she has won many awards for her writing, and she received a Sonoma County poet laureate nomination, and Pushcart nominations. Her photos are featured in an upcoming documentary on Berkeley street poet, Julia Vinograd. Her poem, War’s End (3 days after Hiroshima), is forthcoming in the US Air Force’s annual publication, War, Literature and the Arts.

Kaiden Wilde: Currently based in Northridge, California - unceded Tongva and Chumash territory - Kaiden Wilde is a trans, disabled, multicultural poet and poetry educator pursuing Deaf Studies at CSU Northridge. He has been published in several anthologies, earned first place in multiple poetry slam competitions at the local level, and performed his work in venues across Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles counties including at California Lutheran University and the Majestic Ventura Theater.

His work is highly personal, contemplative, and at times, confessional in its reflection of the complex, tenuous intersections of his identities and the experiences that inform them; this includes explorations of chronic illness, mental illness, developmental disability, lgbtq+ identity, poverty, homelessness, childhood abuse and exploitation, resilience, survival, spirituality, healing, and justice.