7:00 – Open mic (Get in early and sign up for the open mic)
8:00 – Featured Readers, Allison Kennedy and Gahl Liberzon.
Allison Kennedy started writing her junior year of high school to make some friends and stayed because poetry provided so much for her to fall in love with. She participated in the Ann Arbor Neutral Zone Volume Youth Poetry Project and the associated slams, placing in the finals in 2010 and winning in 2011. She attended Brave New Voices for two years on the Ann Arbor Youth Slam Team and is now writing and performing with the Kalamazoo College Poetry Collective. She’s now a student, spending free time watering tropical plants at her job and forcing anyone within twenty feet to read poems by Patrick Rosal, Angel Nafis and Jeffrey McDaniel. She’s excited about most things, and especially kicking it with Gahl Liberzon.
Gahl Liberzon is a senior at the University of Michigan Residential College and School of Education, studying Creative Writing and English Education. A native of Ann Arbor and Community High Alumnus, Gahl learned to cut his teeth in the Neutral Zone’s premier nexus of aneurysm-inducing wordsmithery and fearless social advocacy, the Volume Youth Poetry Project. Gahl is a two-time member of the University of Michigan Poetry Slam team, a three-time coach for the Ann Arbor Youth Slam team, and a recipient of numerous fancy writing awards, including the 2011 Summer Hopwood award for Poetry for the poetry manuscript “Come Back,” which is being released as a chapbook in a forthcoming limited edition by the same name.
