July & August sees Poet Laureates Grace Caffe Aroma
WEDNESDAY NIGHT LIVE kicked off in July of 2025 with Buffalo’s Poet Laureate Aitina Fareed-Cooke. Aitina raised the bar by outfitting the caffe with her own sound system (which she let be used for the following open mic) and sound mixer.
From there, Buffalo’s own ran through a thirty-minute set that included music tracks that had the crowd’s head bobbing (including the Buffalo Hive’s Robert D. Pohl), poems, and an invitation to everyone there to really think about what they wanted to do with their art.
We expect to see more collaboration in the years to come with both Aitina and Get Fokus’d Productions, he creative production company.
In August, we hosted Charolette, NC Poet Laureate Junious ‘Jay’ Ward. Jay is the author of Composition (Button Poetry, 2024). He is a National Poetry Slam Champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion (2019), and is also the author of Lesser Wound (Bull City Press, 2020).
Jay read through pieces from Composition and provided interesting annotations about the purpose of annotations in one of the book’s more interesting takes on form.
It was a pleasure to host both of these incredible writers. We’re looking forward to more interactions between the WEDNESDAY NIGHT LIVE features and the local writing community.
Catch our next feature, Ten Thousand, workshopping at the Caffe at Amy’s and headlining WEDNESDAY NIGHT LIVE September 17th.
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