Virtual - National Poetry Month Reading

Join us as poets from the MFA in Creative Writing program and NC State University Libraries perform original work. Poets will include Natalia Conte, Jessica Dionne, Melanie Tafejian, Alexandra Webster, Chris Vitiello, Chris Tonelli, Amanda Dahill-Moore, and Brooke Peters.

Please register online in advance. The live event link will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Natalia Conte is a poet, editor, and essayist who hails from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at NC State University where she serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the First Year Writing Program. She has been previously published in So to Speak, The Roanoke Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and Atlas and Alice among others. She is an assistant poetry editor for Narrative Magazine and works at a bustling coffee shop in Raleigh, NC.

Chris Vitiello is a Durham-based arts writer, performer, and poet. His most recent books are Irresponsibility and Obedience (both Ahsahta Press). As the Poetry Fox, he writes custom poems on-demand on vintage typewriters at over a hundred events a year. After winning a 2017 ArtPrize Pitch Night, he took his performance installation The Language Is Asleep to the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and has reprised the immersive work for Duke University’s StoryCon, Raleigh’s Block Gallery, and the Greensboro Project Space. He also writes about art and performance, and won the 2017 Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism.

Chris Tonelli is a founding editor of the independent poetry press Birds, LLC; co-director of the NC Book Festival; and author of five chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry, most recently Whatever Stasis (Barrelhouse Books, 2018). He works in the Libraries at NC State and is the co-owner of So & So Books in downtown Raleigh, where he lives with his wife, Allison, and two kids, Miles and Vera.

Brooke Peters serves as the Visitor Relations Specialist for the NC State University Libraries. Her writing can be found in Garbanzo Literary Journal, The Quotable, Certain Circuits, Crab Fat Magazine, and Lavender Review, among other publications. She publishes fiction under the names Brooke Bailey and Bailey Peters.

Amanda Dahill-Moore is a writer, editor, and educator working in libraries. She completed her master’s degree in poetry at the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst, where she received the Daniel and Merrily Glosband Fellowship in Poetry. Recent interviews and poetry appear in jubilat, Fence, So & So, Big, Big, Wednesday and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Inter—, was published in the fall of 2019 by Daisy Mayhem Press.

Originally from Olympia, WA, Melanie Tafejian has spent recent years living in Albania where she served as a health educator with the Peace Corps. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University where she won the 2020 North Carolina State Poetry Contest.

Jessica Dionne is an MFA candidate at NC State and she received her MA in Literature from UNCC. She was a finalist in Narrative's 2019 30 Below contest, and her work has appeared in SWIMM, Rust + Moth, Banshee (IE), Mascara Literary Review (AU), and JMWW. She received a writing residency from the Weymouth Center of the Arts and Humanities and she is a 2019 Best of The Net nominee. 

Alex Webster is a Mid-West poet, born in Oklahoma. She received her MA in English from Missouri State where she worked as an assistant editor for Moon City Review. Alex is currently a second year MFA candidate at NC State.

This event is a partnership between the MFA in Creative Writing Program and the NC State University Libraries.