Join us for more fresh and juicy poetry in this series coordinated by dan raphael!  Each week, a different host invites guest readers to read from current work--so it's a different group of voices each week.  A. Molotkov has brought together this week's group.

David Cooke is one of Portland’s newest poets to be recognized internationally. His debut poem earned the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and a Pushcart nomination. He was crowned champion of AmeriCymru’s Night of the Living Bards and recently won second in the War Poetry Contest. His poems show his love of vivid imagery and colloquial language, his passion for word play and spiritual questioning. He is also a founding member of The Guttery a writing group and can be seen performing with the Moonlit Guttery Team.

Jennifer Lesh was born in San Bernardino, California and has lived in and around Portland, Oregon for the past seven years. She currently resides with her husband and two small children in a house built next to a pioneer graveyard haunted by a Columbia River pilot called Captain Harry. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in XConnect, Main Street Rag, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and other places. The poems she read at the 2011 Wordstock festival can be found in the latest VoiceCatcher anthology, available at Powell's Books and other fine booksellers. She's a former Pushcart Prize nominee and is a founding member of Portland-based writing group, The Guttery (http://theguttery.com/)

Born in St. Petersburg, A. Molotkov arrived in the U.S. in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. He is the winner of various fiction and poetry awards, as well as the 2011 Boone’s Dock Press poetry chapbook contest for his “True Stories from the Future”. Molotkov’s poem was selected for permanent installation in a Kaiser Permanente building in Oregon. “The End of Mythology”, a collaborative chapbook co-written with John Sibley Williams, is due in 2012 from Virgogray Press. AM’s work has appeared in over 60 publications and received two Pushcart nominations. Visit him at www.AMolotkov.com.

John Sibley Williams is the author of six chapbooks, winner of the HEART Poetry Award, and finalist for the Pushcart, Rumi, and The Pinch Poetry Prizes. He has served as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and publicist for various presses and authors, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Book Publishing. A few previous publishing credits include: Inkwell, Bryant Literary Review, Cream City Review, The Chaffin Journal, The Evansville Review, RHINO, Rosebud, Ellipsis, Flint Hills Review, and various fiction and poetry anthologies.