Extremely Online for Wednesday, April 22, 2020: Cassandra de Alba

In accordance with public health concerns, the Boston Poetry Slam has canceled all local events. Instead, we offer the Extremely Online open mic and feature series, weekly on Wednesdays for the month of April 2020.

This Extremely Online show takes place via the free online meeting platform Zoom. A link to signups for the open mic will open at 7:15, and the Zoom link will be posted at 7:40. Open mic begins at 8:00 with the feature to follow around 9:15. To gain access to the show, please use the links posted in the Facebook event on the night of the show.

Local favorite and metaphorical deer hunter Cassandra de Alba. Photo by Emily Cataneo.

Local favorite and metaphorical deer hunter Cassandra de Alba. Photo by Emily Cataneo.

Our originally scheduled feature, Jess Rizkallah, will be rescheduled for later in the season. Instead, we present local favorite and touchstone Cassandra de Alba. Cassandra de Alba is a poet living in Massachusetts. Her chapbooks habitats (Horse Less Press, 2016) and ORB (Reality Hands, 2018) are about deer and the moon, respectively, and Ugly/Sad was released by Glass Poetry Press in 2020. She is a co-host at the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge and an associate editor at Pizza Pi Press.

Cover charge is Pay What You Can, with a suggested donation of $3 via CashApp to $BostonPoetrySlam. Listeners are reminded that poetry may contain some strong language, adult themes, and unfiltered ideas; we ask our open mic participants to provide trigger warnings when appropriate, and to remember to be kind and respectful of a diverse listening experience. This series was founded by Lip Manegio is co-curated by Myles Taylor.


We look forward to welcoming our postponed feature in the near future:

Etal Adnan prizewinner Jess Rizkallah. Photo courtesy of her mom.

Etal Adnan prizewinner Jess Rizkallah. Photo courtesy of her mom.

Jess Rizkallah is a Lebanese-American writer and illustrator. Her full-length collection THE MAGIC MY BODY BECOMES was a finalist for The Believer Poetry Award and won the 2017 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize as awarded by the Radius of Arab-American Writers and University of Arkansas Press. Find her at jessrizkallah.com.