BROADCASTS.com

Thom Francis welcomes poets Sally Rhoades & David Gonsalves who shared their work at the 2024 Word Fest Open Mic at the Sand Lake Center for the Arts on April 27, 2024.\n\nOver the past couple of weeks, I have introduced you to poets who took part in the Word Fest Open Mic at the Sand Lake Center for the Arts. This was our first Word Fest post-pandemic and we couldn't have been happier with the turnout and the talent that was presented on stage that day. It was the perfect ending to a weekend filled with books, writers, spoken word artists, and an amazing lineup of open mic poets.\n\nToday, we are going to hear from two poets who took the stage.\n\nFirst up is a long-time member of the local poetry community, Sally Rhoades. Sally is a former Capital reporter in Albany, N.Y., who began writing poetry in the late 1980s. She is a frequent Albany open mic poet and has featured at various venues. She began traveling out to Oklahoma in 2012 to read at the Woody Gutherie centennial and is a frequent reader at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, Ok. Her poetry has been published in Dragon Poetry Review, 2, Elegant Rage, a poetic tribute honoring the centennial of Woody Gutherie, the Highwatermark Salo[o]n performance series by Stockpot flats, Up the River, by Albany Poets, 8T3 and in Peerglass, an anthology of the Hudson Valley. She is also a performance artist and will be showcasing a new work, Surrender Blue, next September in Oslo, Norway. Her fourth play, My Utica, is in negotiations. She read three poems that are familiar to area attendees of open mics - "Dancing is What Frees Me," "My Dad Was a Good Man," and "Almost Home." \n\nThen David Gonsalves, former editor & publisher of the poetry zine Tin Wreath, took the stage to read a poem by the recently gone poet Jerome Rothenberg (\u201cA Little Boy Lost\u201d) and one of his own entitled "Standoff."