Nexus Poets’ Open Mic | Zoom

Prize-winning poet Janis Harrington of Chapel Hill, NC, is the featured poet at Nexus Poets’ poetry open mic in February. Harrington is author of the book How to Cut a Woman in Half, a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award in 2022.

The event will be held on Zoom only. Poets are welcome to read one original poem following her reading. For the link, and to sign up to read at the open mic, email nexus[at]nexuspoetsdotcom. All poets and listeners are welcome.

Harrington’s first collection, Waiting for the Hurricane (St. Andrews University Press, 2017), was awarded the Lena Shull Book Award by the North Carolina Poetry Society (NCPS). In 2022, she was a finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. She co-hosts Flyleaf Books’ Second Sunday Poetry Reading Series in Chapel Hill, NC. She coordinates the NCPS Gilbert-Chappell Poetry Mentorship Program for central North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Tar River Poetry; Journal of the American Medical Association; North Carolina Literary Review; and numerous other journals.

Harrington’s How to Cut a Woman in Half is “a stunning sequence of sonnets…that reads like a novel,,,, a larger narrative of intergenerational family tragedy, but also of sisterly devotion and resilience,” according to author Cecilia Woloch.

The event is sponsored by Nexus Poets, a collective which has promoted poets and poetry in Eastern North Carolina since 2014.