CANCELLED: Open Door Series: B. Metzger Sampson & mai c. doan

The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. April's Open Door reading series features B. Metzger Sampson and Timothy David Rey, and mai c. doan and student Hana Worku.

B. Metzger Sampson is a poet, essayist, and frequent collaborator with visual artists. Recent publications include interviews, essays, and poems, in Adroit Journal, Temporary Art Review, Hypertext Magazine, and for the Poetry Foundation online. Executive Director of the Chicago Poetry Center, B. has been twice named one of Newcity Magazine’s “Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago.” They previously founded and edited Dear Navigator, an electronic experimental literary magazine for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's MFA in Writing program. Their collaborative visual and written works have been shown in and around Chicago, Neuss, Germany, and Cairo, Egypt.

Timothy David Rey is a Chicago-based poet, playwright, performer, and educator. He attended Indiana University Bloomington, on The Most Outstanding Author scholarship, from IU’s Department of English where he studied poetry under, Pulitzer Prize winner, Yusef Komunyakaa. He is a 2015 Semi-Finalist for the Guild Literary Complex’s Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, and one of the winners of Project Exploration (The Poetry Center of Chicago 2004). His book of poetry and performance, Little Victories, was published in 2012 by NewTown Writers Press. He is currently a Poet In Residence with Chicago Poetry Center and the Chicago Regional Coordinator for Poetry Out Loud. Timothy’s writing has appeared in magazines and journals including 60 Inches From Center, and After Hours: The Chicago Journal of Writing & Art, and will be featured in the upcoming short film, Across by Matthew Riutta.

mai c. doan is poet and writer from Los Angeles, CA. She has published and performed her work though the National Queer Arts Festival, RADAR Productions, Entropy Magazine, Mixed Up!: A Zine about Mixed Race Queer and Feminist Experience, and more. She is a 2016 recipient of the James D. Phelan Literary Award and holds an MFA from Mills College, where she attended as a Community Engagement Fellow. mai is committed to poetry that is necessary and responsive and finds camaraderie in work by women, queer, and trans writers of color enacting radical uses of language to create and complicate the telling of our rage, bodies, histories, and desires. water/tongue is her first full-length book, published by Omnidawn in April 2019. She lives in Chicago, IL.

Hana Worku is a writer, software developer, and organizer deeply interested in process. How are things put together and how do they come apart? Her creative work explores patterns and dissonance in this arena.