Al-Bustan Friday Arts Series: Poetry Reading & Open Mic

FREE!!! Bring your partner, bring your family, bring your friends, or just yourself because this is PALENTINES!

The award winning poet and curator of the Al-Bustan poetry series this season, Ahmad Almallah, will open the event at our new hub on Lancaster Ave every second Friday with a invitational poem followed by a reading of the local and renowned poets. This month we have the privileged to launch our series with a reading from Alina MacNeal, a Philadelphia-based poet and educator.

Following the reading there will be an open-mic where poets of all styles and walks of life with be encouraged to share their art and engage in conversation and exchange.

RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/second-friday-poetry-reading-open-mic-tickets-92392912689
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Alina MacNeal was born in Poland and came to the US with her family at the age of nine. She is a Philadelphia-based educator, architect, and co-host of a poetry series at Fergie’s Pub. Her poems have appeared in Apiary, Poetry24, Poems for the Writing, and The World to Come, and she has read her work at First Person Arts, Big Blue Marble, Green Line Cafe, Main Point Books, Poetry Ink, and other venues. She has been a member of the faculty at Drexel University since 1990, teaching in the Department of Architecture, the Department of Art History and Visual Studies, and the Honors College. In the last four years she has become interested in literary translation, particularly of satirical Polish poetry from the 1930’s, focusing on the works of Julian Tuwim.

Ahmad Almallah’s first book of poems Bitter English is now available in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press. He received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson
Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his set of poems “Recourse,” won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his poems appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads
will lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees and forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review and Cordite Poetry Review. He holds a Ph.D. in Arabic Literature from IUB and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College. He currently lives in Philadelphia and teaches Arabic and Creative Writing at the
University of Pennsylvania.