CALLICOON, NY — The Western Sullivan Public Library is hosting a 10th anniversary First Fridays Author Series! 

With only two more sessions remaining, stop by on Friday, November 3, from 6:15 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Delaware Free Branch to see a national award-winning author, hear a local feature, and participate in an open mic. 

Polish up your poems, and soak up some good words. Register on the library’s calendar at www.WSPLonline.org.  

For additional information, email Lmoran@rcls.org.  

The evening starts at 6:15 p.m. with an open mic sign-up and continues with national award-winning poet Ray McNiece. He has authored 11 books of poems and monologues and CDs, most recently “Love Song for Cleveland,” a collaboration with photographer Tim Lachina and Breath Burns Away, New Haiku. 

In a review of his second theatre work, “Us? Talking Across America,” the Star-Phoenix said, “His thoughtful writing combines with perfectly timed delivery to create a powerful wordscape that owes as much to jazz as drama.” 

McNiece has toured Italy twice with Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He fronts the improv band Tongue-in-Groove. He has received a Creative Work Force Fellowship, a CPAC grant, and residencies at The Cuyahoga Valley National Park and the Jack Kerouac House. 

He was the 10th Poet Laureate of Cleveland Heights, and received the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. He was awarded a $50,000 Poet Laureate grant from the American Academy of Poetry for his Poem for Cleveland Project in 2022, from which the anthology “Poem For Cleveland” was created. 

Other local features this month: Chana Pollack and Doug Rogers.

This event is funded with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant Program of the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Delaware Valley Arts Alliance.

To view all of our programs, visit our calendar at www.wsplonline.org, and register if necessary. Email wsplprograms@rcls.org with any questions.