Michael R. Brown featured performer July 26 at Midtown Scholar Bookstore.

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July 26 at Poetry Thursdays, Michael R. Brown will be featured performer at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, PA. Keith Snow will be guest host for this occasion, and he'll also moderate a brief open reading before Brown's performance.

Michael R. Brown was born in Philadelphia in the first half of the last century. He grew up in Marietta and Columbia and graduated from Lancaster Catholic High School.

He attended the University of Scranton and taught in an all-black, all-girls high school.  His university work included a dissertation in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance.

Brown has had four books of poetry published: FallingWallendas, Tia Chucha (1994); The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides, Hanover Press (2003); Susquehanna, Ragged Sky (2003); The Confidence Man, Ragged Sky (2007).  

Michael R. Brown was part of the burgeoning slam poetry movement in Chicago back in the day and was instrumental in spreading the phenomenon throughout New England.  He and Patricia Smith established The Cantab (1992) in Cambridge, MA, carried the slam to Sweden, and led a US national championship team in 1993.

He and Erkki Lappalainen organized the first Poetry Olympics in Stockholm in 1998. He also created Dr. Brown’s Traveling Poetry Show, a two-hour theater production.

From 2008 until 2016, Brown, and his wife Valerie Lawson put out Off the Coast, an international poetry quarterly. In 2017 they established Resolute Bear Press, which published a book of his political poems, The Martin Bormann Dog, Care Book, and her 3 Nations Anthology with writing from Canada, Native American people, and New Englanders.

The Almost Uptown Poetry Cartel hosts Poetry Thursdays, a long time reading series, every Thursday evening, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM, at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore, 1302 North Third Street, (across from the Broad Street Market) Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 17102.  Ph: 717.236.1680.