The Pat Conroy Literary Center’s monthly Open Mic Night will be presented as a virtual event, live-streamed to our Facebook page, on Thursday, March 13, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Our featured presenter is multi-genre author Susan Tekulve, whose newest book is Bodies of Light, her first full-length poetry collection. Hosted by poet Melissa Whiteford St. Clair, Open Mic will also feature short readings of 3 to 5 minutes each by other writers in many genres.
When: Thursday, March 13, 2025 at 6 PM – 7:30 PM EDT
Price: Free · Duration: 1 hr 30 min
Where: Virtual – Facebook
Interested in reading as part of Open Mic? Let us know at contact@patconroyliterarycenter.org
We want to build our community of writers and an appreciation for the art and talent of new, emerging, and long-time writers. Thank you for supporting this partnership!
About our author:
Susan Tekulve’s newest book Bodies of Light is her first full-length poetry collection. She is the author of Second Shift: Essays (Del Sol Press) and In the Garden of Stone (Hub City Press), winner of the South Carolina Novel Prize and a Gold IPPY Award. She’s also published two short story collections: Savage Pilgrims (Serving House Books) and My Mother’s War Stories (Winnow Press).
Her photo essay, “White Blossoms,” appeared in Issue 12 of the KYSO Flash Anthology. Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry has appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Louisville Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and Shenandoah. Her web chapbook, Wash Day, appears in the Web Del Sol International Chapbook Series, and her story collection, My Mother’s War Stories, received the 2004 Winnow Press fiction prize. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She teaches in the BFA and MFA writing programs at Converse University.
“Susan Tekulve’s Bodies of Light both illuminates and enchants. In odes to body parts—teeth and thumbs, feet and hair—as well as bodies inside bodies (pregnancies), this poet delights in the corporal and spiritual. In elegies, Tekulve honors the bodies of her beloved dead and the magic of her garden. Hummingbirds, tarantulas, stinkbugs, spiders, and bees wearing ‘tiny yellow combat boots’ populate these terrific poems of wonder and dazzle.”–Denise Duhamel, author of Pink Lady, Scald, and Blowout
“It’s a kind of magic, the way Susan Tekulve’s forthright monosyllabic titles (Bonnet, Grief, Kimono, Son—the list goes on) blossom into poems so lush in vision, so voluptuous in vocabulary and song, they feel as bountiful as the planet we live on. Tekulve’s poems have their specific concerns of course (parenting, for example, and world travel) but ultimately she’s in love with existence itself, whether elegiac or celebratory, and her one-word titles (Relics, Geodes, Feathers: the list goes on) are keys to a lavish proof of that love’s great depth.”–Albert Goldbarth, author of History (and Pre-), Saving Lives, and Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology
