Award-winning poet Priscilla Webster-Williams is the Featured Poet at the Nexus Poets’ First Tuesday Poetry Open Mic at 7 p.m., Tuesday night October 5th. After months of meeting via Zoom the Open Mic is now a hybrid meeting offering a live Zoom and in-person reading.
The free event at 308 Meadows Street in New Bern is open to the public. After the Featured Poet reads, the mike is open for original poems from other poets who sign up. If you want to receive Nexus Poets emails including the evening’s Zoom link or be listed to read you can email nexus@nexuspoets.com. If there is enough time you can also sign up to read during the event.
Priscilla Webster-Williams is the author of the chapbook The Narrative Possibilities of Coral. It was a runner-up in the inaugural 2016 Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Contest and published by Main Street Rag in 2017. Poet Betty Adcock has called the collection “A story as sturdy and intriguing as a novel, full of mystery and sorrow that yet wears the colors of celebration.”
Priscilla’s poetry has garnered several awards, including the 2016 Rash Award in Poetry sponsored by Broad River Review, and The Poet Laureate Award from The North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Broad River Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Main Street Rag, Pinesong, Soundings East, and Unlocking the Poem, and her poetry and collages have been featured in art exhibits and at festivals for cancer survivors.
In Boston she studied poetry and joined the Every Other Thursday Poetry Collective. She earned an M.Ed. from Cambridge College, and worked in public health education. After moving to North Carolina, she worked at the Durham VA, enrolling patients in The National Registry of Veterans with ALS. A former president of the North Carolina Poetry Society, she enjoys being a part of the state’s vibrant poetry community. She lives in Durham.
Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti called The Narrative Possibilities of Coral “the kind of retrospective epiphany of poetry refracted through memory. These poems, as we turn them over and over, are prismatic, faceted. By their glow, we are led inevitably back through the labyrinth of time to moments resurrected and reimagined through a language at once arresting and plaintive. Read this book. There’s nothing at all ordinary about it.”
The event at the New Bern Unitarian Fellowship is located at 308 Meadows Street. This is a free event with donations requested to pay for the space. The event is sponsored by the Nexus Poets, a group of Eastern North Carolina poets promoting poetry in the area.
By Sam Love