This month Just Poets features Melissa Balmain with a program on Light Verse

Melissa writes....“National and world events have unleashed a flood of poetry--and much of it, thankfully, has been funny. I'll be sharing some recent topical light verse (both political and not), as well as news-inspired poems of the past. Along the way, I'll discuss what makes for successful topical light verse... and I'll come prepared with an exercise or two to help members warm up their funny bones.”

Melissa Balmain edits Light, an online journal of light verse (formerly a print journal, Light Quarterly), and teaches humor writing, poetry writing, and journalism at the University of Rochester. Though she has received the Able Muse Book Award and twice been a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, some of her favorite prizes are Abe Lincoln bobbleheads, salt and pepper shakers that look like outhouses, and other classy items she has won in light-verse contests. Her poems have appeared in such places as American Arts Quarterly, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, Poetry Daily, Snakeskin, The New Verse News, The Spectator(UK), and The Washington Post‘s Style Invitational; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Success. Melissa’s poetry collection, Walking In on People (Able Muse Press, 2014), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

As usual, bring 8 copies of a poem you are working on for our group workshop that will run after the program (from 3:00 to 4:00 pm).

The meeting is in the COP Conference Room, on the second floor of the Campus Center.