Category: Literary arts

When poet Chris Wise moved to Houston about 20 years ago, he searched for open mics where he could perform his poetry.  That’s when he discovered First Fridays—and he’s a better writer for it, he says.

“What I liked about it was that it was free, which is a beautiful comment on who may participate. I was very broke back then,” said Wise. “The range of skill level and notoriety of the readers spanned the spectrum—so there really was a space for everyone. I became friends with the writers I admired, and in turn I learned from them.”

There have been other local poetry readings and open mics that he’s attended over the years, he added, but some are gone or now rebooted under different concepts by different people.

“First Fridays has been consistent and under one person, Robert Clark,” Wise said.

Clark, a longtime Houston-based poet, educator, and director of the Houston Poetry Festival, established First Fridays in 1975. He coordinated and hosted it without interruption until March 2020 when it was indefinitely suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Determined to bring it out of its hiatus and to continue Clark’s vision, a group of 20 local poets and First Friday regulars organized and rallied this past winter, and came up with a plan to revive the series.

“[Robert] has been hoping that someone would pick up his love and passion for his First Friday Reading Series for him,” said Richard Gamez, Clark’s longtime partner. Clark has been struggling with health issues recently, leading loved ones to establish a GoFund Me campaign on his behalf.

First Fridays is now set to relaunch over the next 12 months at Inprint, resuming for the first time since the pandemic. Four local poets (Kelly Anne Ellis, Angelique Jamail, Yolanda Movsessian, and Chris Wise) will rotate as hosts. Each event is free and includes a reading by a featured poet, followed by an open mic for anyone to perform their work.

Wise shared with Houston Arts Journal the First Fridays 2023-2024 season schedule:

DATE	HOST	FEATURED POET
April 7, 2023	Chris Wise	Marlon Lizama
May 5, 2023	Kelly Anne Ellis	John Gorman
June 2, 2023	Yolanda Movsessian	Anthony Sutton
July 7, 2023	Yolanda Movsessian	Rebecca Danelly
August 4, 2023	Kelly Anne Ellis	Tina Cardona
September 1, 2023	Kelly Anne Ellis	Maha Abdel Wahab
October 6, 2023	Yolanda Movsessian	Ayokunle Falomo
November 3, 2023	Angelique Jamail	Charlie Scott
December 1, 2023	Chris Wise	Amir Safi
January 5, 2024	Angelique Jamail	Christa Forster
February 2, 2024	Angelique Jamail	Paige Poe
March 1, 2024	Chris Wise	Blacksnow

The inaugural post-pandemic reading is Friday, April 7, 2023 at 8pm at Inprint. Doors open at 7:30pm. Chris Wise hosts poet-activist Marlon Lizama, author of My Spanglish Hip Hop Story.

A piece of Houston’s literary history

During its 45 years, from 1975-2020, First Fridays grew into a series beloved by local poets.

“I always have a great time when I am able to go and look forward to getting to hear a variety of poets, those that I have known for years and new friends I’m meeting for the first time,” wrote Lupe Mendez, 2022-2023 Texas Poet Laureate, in an article for Poets & Writers.

Stories of its venue changes have taken on the quality of folklore, according to poet and original attendee R.T. Castleberry.

Castleberry recalls First Fridays’ early years, when the open mics and readings were held at locations like an auction house, the Orange Show, a café, and music clubs and bars—including Hard Thymes, a former folk music venue once located on Bissonnet.

“Hard Thymes was split between a bar area and a performance/eating area complete with an elevated stage. In the five or so years First Friday was held there, it became notorious for the rowdy behavior of both performers and audiences. As mentioned, it had a bar area,” said Castleberry.

After Hard Thymes closed, the series moved to the former Firehouse Gallery on Westheimer.

“The Firehouse featured a large, brick porch for performers and audiences to relax and visit on, a tiny kitchen area behind the performance area where the cool kids hung out drinking beer and double glass doors in the street level performance area,” recalled Castleberry.

“In the days when the Westheimer Weekend Crawl was in its heyday, the poets read with their backs to the street—and the street traffic. The Firehouse also continued in the First Friday reputation for unruliness,” he said.

First Fridays eventually settled down its roots at Inprint, which has provided a home for the series for the past 20-plus years.

“[Robert Clark] wanted there to be a space for local poets to share their work with the public and each other. He was committed to always highlighting a featured writer, followed by an open mic, so that less established writers could share a poem or two,” said Krupa Parikh, Inprint’s Associate Director.

Parikh says that some of the memorable and distinguished local poets, who have performed on the series over the years, include current and former Houston Poet Laureates Emanuelee “Outspoken” Bean, Robin Davidson, Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, and others.

“Our former Houston Mayor Annise Parker was once an open mic poet,” Parikh added.

Legacy as Houston’s “oldest”

First Fridays has often been called Houston’s “oldest poetry reading series”—a distinction based on a general consensus among local poets.

Houston Arts Journal also reviewed the timeline of several local reading series. Inprint’s own Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, now in its 42^nd season, is a close second oldest (and features both poetry and fiction). In addition, Houston has plenty of other well-established literary series that have formed in the past two-to-three decades and in recent years, including Gulf Coast, Nuestra Palabra, Poison Pen, Public Poetry, Write About Now, and Tintero Projects. Together, they provide an overlapping network of poets, writers, and lovers of the written and spoken word, forming the fabric of the city’s literary scene.

Parikh believes that First Fridays has had a “tremendous impact” on the local poetry community.

“It has given established and emerging poets a platform to share their work and helped many local poets connect with each other. It has also helped encourage many to keep writing poetry and keep nurturing a love of it,” she said.

Poet Chris Wise also notes that the series’ supportive and welcoming atmosphere creates a space not only to enjoy poetry—but to learn, collaborate, receive feedback, and share opportunities on a more level playing field.

“The collection of word artists who come to First Fridays range from unpublished to widely published,” he said. “First Fridays has always bridged the gap between street poets and academic poets, between the beats and the elites.”

Parikh says that part of what makes First Fridays unique is “a very community-based feel, thanks to the way Robert ran it”—a spirit that organizers have aimed to recreate in their grassroots efforts behind First Fridays’ relaunch, keeping it independent from any institution.

“While Inprint is proud to be host of the series and provide support, the curation, logistical planning, and organizing of First Fridays today is led by community members,” said Parikh. “We are thrilled to see the way these community members are coming together to reignite the series and carry on Robert’s legacy.”

The Texas Institute of Letters recently announced the winners of its annual Literary Awards – writers whose works represent “the best of Texas literature,” as described by the organization’s president Diana López.

“Each year, the TIL recognizes the best of Texas writing in a variety of genres that includes fiction, poetry, nonfiction, scholarly writing, design, and short form works. Many thanks to our judges for carefully considering the entries,” said López in a statement. “This year’s winners demonstrate the wonderful talent and diversity of writers with Texas roots.”

Eligibility for the 2023 awards required that “the author was born in Texas or has lived in Texas for at least five consecutive years at some time. A work with subject matter that substantially concerns Texas is also eligible,” according to online guidelines. The work must have been published in 2022.

Winners will collectively receive more than $27,000 in prizes, to be presented at the Texas Institute of Letters Awards Ceremony in Corpus Christi on April 29, 2023.

Jasminne Mendez, a multigenre writer and translator based in Houston, is the winner of the 2023 TIL Award for Best Book of Poetry for City Without Altar (Noemi Press).

City Without Altar is a poetry collection and play in verse that explores what it means to live, love, heal and experience violence as a Black person in the world. The titular play in verse that sits at the center of the book seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of victims, survivors and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that occurred along the northwest Dominican/Haitian border during the Trujillo Era. Between the scenes of the play are “interludes” that explore a different kind of “cutting” and what it means to feel othered because of illness, disability and blackness.

Noemi Press

Mendez was also named a finalist for the 2023 TIL Best Young Adult Book Award for Islands Apart: Becoming Dominican American (Piñata Books), a memoir of her coming-of-age experiences in the United States as an Afro-Latina. A winner of Arte Público Press’ 2021 Salinas de Alba Award for her debut children’s book Josefina’s Habichuelas (Arte Público Press), Mendez also recently published her first middle grade novel in verse, Aniana del Mar Jumps In, released on March 14, 2023.

Acclaimed Houston poet Ayokunle Falomo was recognized as a finalist in the 2023 TIL Best Book of Poetry category for his collection, AfricanAmeriCan’t (Flowersong Press).

“In AfricanAmeriCan’t, Falomo tenderly traces his body on the American political map. The exciting inventiveness of language wills Diasporic histories into poetic form,” said poet and filmmaker Loyce Gayo, in a statement on the book. “This feat of a project gives those of us tussling with the many failures of nation permission to own and fully embrace a boundless grief, a righteous rage, and bountiful stillness.”

A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, Falomo has been anthologized and published by Houston Public Media, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Texas Review, New England Review, Write About Now, and others.

Houston writer J. Estanislao Lopez was named a finalist in the 2023 TIL Award for First Book of Poetry for We Borrowed Gentleness (J. Alice James Books) – praised as a “compelling debut collection” that contains an “unsentimental directness,” in a review by David Woo.

“[Lopez] knows that words, however meager, help to counter life’s irremediable violence,” wrote Woo in his review. “For Lopez, the details begin in Texas, with a father who crossed the river from Nuevo Laredo …”

Lopez’s poetry has been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and Poetry Magazine, and he earned an MFA from Warren Wilson Program for Writers.

Founded in 1936, the Texas Institute of Letters is a nonprofit honor society that aims to celebrate Texas writers, as well as literary works with ties to the Lone Star State. According to a press release, its elected members include Texas-based writers who have won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Man Booker Prize, Academy Award, International Latino Book Award, Americas Award, Lambda Literary Award, MacArthur Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship.

TIL’s long history of supporting and honoring Texas literature through various author awards can be traced to 1939, as archived on its website.

A complete list of 2023 TIL Literary Award winners can be found here.

When Ariana Lee heard about the recent mass shooting in Monterey Park, California, she said she felt deeply saddened and wanted to write a poem to help process her thoughts.

On January 21, a gunman killed 11 people as they rang in the Lunar New Year at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, before he was later disarmed by a 26-year old man named Brandon Tsay, who prevented the gunman from carrying out a second nearby attack.

Lee, a high school senior at St. John’s School, was appointed the 2022-2023 Houston Youth Poet Laureate last November. And now, only a few months into her term, she found herself writing an elegy about a mass shooting – one that felt especially personal because of its intersection with two holidays: Lunar New Year and her 18^th birthday.

Remembering that her predecessor Avalon Hogans had written a poem after the Uvalde tragedy for March for Our Lives Houston, Lee decided to contact that organization to offer to write a poem, to be shared in collaboration on social media. The result was “Morning, America,” written in response to the Monterey Park shooting. 

Watch Ariana Lee perform her poem below.  Houston Arts Journal also reached out to Lee for an interview and permission to reprint her poem, which follows.

Morning, America

Today, I am eighteen years old.

At age seventeen,
yesterday, and the day
before, and the day
before, I woke up
to mourning.

I woke up to mourn
what was before me.

When there have been more mass shootings
in the year than there have been days,
and when there are more guns
in the US than there are people,
you wonder if eighteen—the legal age
to buy a gun—is worth celebrating.

Lunar New Year always occurs
around my birthday. We wear red
for good luck and eat
long noodles for longevity.
Put your hands together like a prayer—
新年快乐，身体健康，恭喜发财，吉祥如意.

But now we pray. You would think
the gun industry had joined us
in our spring cleaning, the way our deaths
are so easily swept under the rug. We set off
firecrackers to ward off evil, but I hear
gunshots. Maybe if I wear enough red,
bullets will stop wearing holes in our communities.

My culture is my inheritance, and the biggest
evil is how inherent gun violence has become to our culture.

We’ve crossed into the Year of the Rabbit.
I think we’ve had enough time to learn
this lesson: Look from one end
of the barrel, and it’s easy to see prey.

It should not be this easy to turn
sacred into scared. We wish: 新年快乐，
但是我们的乐真的很快.
Can our happiness only
be fleeting? And fleeing,
our best method to avoid death?

It’s been eighteen years
since my birth. I’ve celebrated
eighteen Lunar New Years.

This holiday means sleeping with a 红包
under my pillow for fifteen days. It means waking.
I wake up. Wake up—it’s beyond time
to make a good morning.

Ariana Lee

How did this poem come to you? What were you feeling or thinking when you sat down to write it? Would you like to say a little about your writing process?

When I know what I want to say, I tend to write poems pretty quickly. This poem came from letting my emotions guide my writing. I was inspired by characteristics of Lunar New Year such as the color red, spring cleaning, and the 红包 (red envelope). 

How did you learn of the shooting and how did it affect you?  The poem seems to imply that it was on your birthday, as well as Lunar New Year – is that right? If so, how did the fact that it happened on or around those holidays affect you?

I learned a lot about the shooting in part because I serve as a co-president of my school’s East Asian Affinity Group and on the leadership board of our Unity Council. We extensively researched it for a joint forum to inform students and give them time and space to process what had happened. 

In my personal life, Monterey Park struck a chord because of how culturally important Lunar New Year is to my family. It should be a time of celebration. The holiday occurs on a different day every year because it follows the lunar calendar, but it typically occurs a few days before or after my birthday (January 25th). One year it was even the same day. Growing up, I saw Lunar New Year and my birthday as a package deal. This year, they were marked by tragedy—a preventable one. Learning about Monterey Park has motivated me to be active in gun violence prevention.

In your social media post, you wrote: “Thinking of Fort Pierce, Baton Rouge, Half Moon Bay, and Des Moines. Thinking of all the poets who’ve written this poem before. Thinking of my grandparents.”  Can you say more about what you mean by that?   And, in particular, can you tell me a little about your grandparents, and how you were thinking of them?

After Monterey Park, mass shootings occurred in Baton Rouge and Half Moon Bay. There have also been shootings in Fort Pierce and Des Moines. So many in such a short time. I wanted to acknowledge that, even though my poem was written in response to Monterey Park, it’s really for each community affected by gun violence. 

The second sentence refers to the fact that many brilliant poets before me have written poems in response to senseless, unnecessary violence. Specific poems that inspired me are “not an elegy for Mike Brown” by Danez Smith and “what the dead know by heart” by Donte Collins. 

The victims of the Monterey Park shooting are around the same age as my grandparents. When I read about them—Xiujuan Yu, Hongying Jian, Lilian Li, Wen Yu, My Nhan, Muoi Ung, Valentino Alvero, Diana Tom, Yu Kao, Ming Wei Ma, Chia Yau—I couldn’t help but see my Laolao and Yeye in them. 

What do you believe is the role of poetry (or art, in general) in times of crisis or profound loss?

For me, art is healing and inspiration. Art can connect with people in a way that the plain, straight facts can’t. When crises challenge society, I believe poetry’s role is to bring people together and give them words to meditate over when they are at a loss of words themselves. 

***

Translations for “Morning, America”:
新年快乐 = Happy New Year
身体健康 = Wishing you good health
恭喜发财 = Wishing you prosperity
吉祥如意 = Wishing you good luck
但是我们的乐真的很快 = but our happiness really is fleeting
红包 = red envelope