The Moonstone Arts Center promotes creative exchange through diverse cultural programs.Each year Moonstone produces over 200 public events including poetry
12/30/2025
Our first live reading of 2026 is a celebration of our poetry reading hosts! Join us on January 7th at to hear selections from our featured hosts for the year.
We hope you join us in the new year to meet our hosts, hear their latest work, and gather in community.
12/14/2025
Our last poetry reading of the year – What happened to our rights?
The United States’ Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791, meant to guarantee civil rights and liberties. Below is a reminder of the rights included in the ratification. Join us and reflect on the founding of the United States.
Free and open to everyone.
12/07/2025
Join us for our biggest live poetry reading of the year!
The 30th Annual Poetry Ink Anthology contains 118 poems by poets from around the world. Even if you aren’t included in the anthology, you’re welcome to come to this Moonstone annual tradition.
We want you all: Published Poets, Unpublished Poets, Academic Poets, Street Poets, Poets who write Sonnets, Villanelle, Haiku, Ekphrastic poems, Concrete Poems, Epitaph, Limerick, Ballad, Ode, Free Verse. Join us for our 30th year of Presenting Poetry Ink.
11/23/2025
Join us at for a release celebration of Craig Czury’s latest collection of new and selected poems!
Craig Czury has been conducting innovative life-writing and poetry workshops in schools, shelters, prisons, psych wards, community centers, and universities for over 30 years. A native of the Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania, Craig is also an editor, publisher, and tireless arts advocate. He has authored over 20 books of poetry, many of which are translated into other languages, and he has been featured in poetry festivals all over the world. Craig lives, writes, and teaches in northern Italy and in northeastern Pennsylvania.
You can purchase copies at the event or online on Square here.
J. C. Todd explores the traumatic effects of war on women and the environment. Author of six books of poetry, most recently Beyond Repair (Able Muse Press, 2021) and a bilingual new and selected What Kept Me Awake? / Kas neleido užmigti? (PDR, 2024), she is a co-editor of Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, a ground-breaking anthology addressing war’s damage to the natural world (Scarlet Tanager Press, 2026). Awards include fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has taught Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College and in the Rosemont MFA Program.
Olga Livshin’s poetry and translations recently appear in Poetry magazine, the Southern Review, the New York Times, and Ploughshares. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019). Livshin co-translated Lyudmyla Khersonska’s Today is a Different War (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and Vladimir Gandelsman’s A Man Only Needs a Room (New Meridian Arts, 2022). She lives just outside Philadelphia.
Open Reading Follows
11/23/2025
Celebrate Craig Czury’s newest release of new and selected poems with us at !
Craig Czury has been conducting innovative life-writing and poetry workshops in schools, shelters, prisons, psych wards, community centers, and universities for over 30 years. A native of the Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania, Craig is also an editor, publisher, and tireless arts advocate. He has authored over 20 books of poetry, many of which are translated into other languages, and he has been featured in poetry festivals all over the world. Craig lives, writes, and teaches in northern Italy and in northeastern Pennsylvania.
J. C. Todd explores the traumatic effects of war on women and the environment. Author of six books of poetry, most recently Beyond Repair (Able Muse Press, 2021) and a bilingual new and selected What Kept Me Awake? / Kas neleido užmigti? (PDR, 2024), she is a co-editor of Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, a ground-breaking anthology addressing war’s damage to the natural world (Scarlet Tanager Press, 2026). Awards include fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has taught Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College and in the Rosemont MFA Program.
Olga Livshin’s poetry and translations recently appear in Poetry magazine, the Southern Review, the New York Times, and Ploughshares. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019). Livshin co-translated Lyudmyla Khersonska’s Today is a Different War (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and Vladimir Gandelsman’s A Man Only Needs a Room (New Meridian Arts, 2022). She lives just outside Philadelphia.
Open Reading Follows
11/16/2025
We’ve been busy this fall with five new poetry anthologies on a variety of themes! From Indigenous People’s Day to the legacy of Joe Hill, we’ve asked poets to reflect on how our past continues to influence the future.
All publications are available now on our Square.
11/13/2025
Sunday, November 16th - 5pm - LIVE
Fergie’s Pub - 1214 Sansom Street
Toussaint St. Negritude , author and winner of the 2025 Firebird Award for the collection of poems “Mountain Spells”, former Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, and 2024 Nominee for Poet Laureate of Vermont, poet, bass clarinetist, and composer Toussaint St. Negritude conjures whole liberations in full tempo. US Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described his work as “full of sweet sounds and surprises.” Originally from San Francisco, Toussaint has lived and broadly thrived across the African Diaspora, from the sacred mountains of Haiti to the Coltrane District of North Philadelphia. He, along with bassist Gahlord Dewald, is the leader of the band Jaguar Stereo!, a free-form ensemble of his own poetry and improvisational jazz, and his works have been widely published and recorded for over 40 years. On an alpine sanctuary facing east, Toussaint St. Negritude continues to thrive in the farthest elevations of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Aaren Perry’s most recent book Shipping and Receiving is published by Moonstone. Bilingual with an MFA from Vermont College, Perry is a grant writer, health advocate and editor. He edited a forthcoming collection of new poems by lamont b. steptoe; co-edited with James Villarreal, Under Lock and Key: 100 Poems From Death Row, by Anthony Reid; and co-edited The Art Of Inclusion with John Lavin and Eleanor Wilner. Shipping and Receiving (Moonstone) and Open Fire (Whirlwind Press) are available at [email protected].
Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, a hybrid researcher/scholar/performer, has had over 28 plays produced, 20 productions, 13 staged readings, 8 one-woman shows and she has performed poetry in over 120 national and international venues. Williams-Witherspoon is a contributing poet to 49 anthologies and magazines, author of 11 books of poetry, 9 book chapters, 7 journal articles and 2 books on African American Theater. She is the recipient of a host of awards and citations. Her scholarly work centers around pedagogy, women’s issues, the African diaspora, performance rituals and community engagement.
11/13/2025
Sunday, November 16th - 2pm - VIRTUAL - Zoom registration link available on website
“My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide.
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan -
‘Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.’
My body? - Oh! - If I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will.
Good luck to all of you.”
— Joe Hill
“The labor troubadour Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah on November 19, 1915, accused of murdering two shopkeepers. Five years earlier, while working on the docks in California, Hill met members of the IWW and became an active Wobbly. Soon his humorous and biting political songs, like “The Preacher and the Slave,” were being sung on picket lines across the country. From his jail cell in Utah, Hill wrote to “Big Bill” Haywood in a telegram, “Don’t waste time mourning. Organize!”—a line that became a slogan of the U.S. labor movement. On the eve of his ex*****on, Hill penned these words.”
From “Voices of A People’s History,” edited by Zinn and Arnove
Join us on Zoom as poets reflect ~
11/10/2025
Thursday, November 13th - 5:30pm
Free Library - 1901 Vine Street, History Department on the 2nd floor
“One Jan Barry’s most characteristic beliefs comes from a poem called “The Peacemaker” by Walker Knight: “Peace, like war, is waged.” Jan Barry has been actively and energetically waging peace since he turned away from an appointment to the US Military Academy and chose a very different path into his own future.
All through the book, I encounter over and over again Jan’s refusal to give in to despair, his unwavering belief that good will eventually come of good-willed people acting together. He challenges Americans to protest and resist the agenda of the “tyrannical head of state” now occupying the White House. He urges all of us to vigorously and actively support federal employees, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, and a free and independent Ukraine.
“Here, in a few words, is what Jan Barry taught me: ‘take that rage and pain and frustration and do something constructive with it.’” – W. D. Ehrhart
Waging Peace: From Vietnam to Volgograd ($30.00 – 2025) is a collection of essays, poetry and art by Jan Barry, a Veterans For Peace Poet Laureate and cofounder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The memoir conveys memorable stories about the transformation of soldiers in war zones into communities of peace activists. Jan Barry is the author of Waging Art: Tackling Grief and Trauma with Creative Arts, among other works.
Smart Fish Don’t Bite ($22.00 – 2025) by W. D. Ehrhart, a Marine Corps veteran of both the Vietnam War and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The author of multiple books of both prose and poetry, including Vietnam-Perkasie: a Combat Marine Memoir, and Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems. As the poems in this most recent collection demonstrate, he is a writer who fought in Vietnam, not a Vietnam writer.
Hope to see you there~
11/07/2025
Sunday November 9th, 5pm - LIVE
Come celebrate Ditta Baron Hoeber’s release of her new book, “Without You”!
“In flashes of recollection, in flares of supposition and speculation, the fragments and fables of Ditta Baron Hoeber’s Without You trace the aftermath of a childhood trauma, with its attendant guilts and resentments and mystifications. Terse, taut, gnomic, wrenching, and subtly evocative, Without You offers a compelling demonstration of a reality at once irrecoverable and irrevocable.” — Nathalie Anderson, Professor Emerita, Swarthmore College, author of Stain
Ditta Baron Hoeber’s ( ) first book, “Without You” is just out, her poems have been published in magazines including Gargoyle, Burningword Literary Review, Noon, Pank, the American Poetry Review and the American Journal of Poetry. Her photographs, drawings and book works have been exhibited nationally and have been acquired by several collections in the US and in the UK.
Also featuring~
Lisa Isaacson who has published poems in antiphony, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Fence and Denver Quarterly among others. She has recently returned to the United States after 22 years teaching World Humanities and World Poetry in Abu Dhabi, UAE and now lives in Milwaukee.
Hope to see you there!
11/03/2025
Wednesday, November 5th at 7pm~
Join us to celebrate the release of “Headless” by Sean Hanrahan!
“In ‘Headless,’ poet Sean Hanrahan takes us on a winding road that twists through desire, intellectual curiosity, and various explored icons…traveling with a speaker always seeking to understand who and what society expects him to be…The self is multifaceted, multitalented, and-belying the title-multiheaded. Hanrahan, at the height of his poetic power, has learned to navigate this hydralike path and ‘choose the sacramental in-between.’ In these pages, we are blessed to be invited to walk beside him.” - Chad Frame, author of “Little Black Book”
Sean Hanrahan is the author of Headless, Safer Behind Popcorn and Ghost Signs, Hardened Eyes on the Scan and Gay Cake . His work has also been included in various anthologies and journals, he has taught classes titled “A Chapbook in 49 Days,” “Ekphrastic Poetry,” “Poetry Embodied,” and has hosted and read at poetry events throughout Philadelphia.
Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection Every Living Day and Poems to Stage Dive to. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work can be found in Ninth Letter, The Offing, Poet Lore, Third Coast, Northwest Review, and elsewhere.
Alison Lubar teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a q***r, nonbinary, biracial Nikkei femme whose life work has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices to young people. They’re the author of The Other Tree, and METAMOURPHOSIS, as well as four chapbooks and is a board member for Philadelphia’s Blue Stoop.
Amy Saul-Zerby is the author of Paper Flowers, Imaginary Birds, Deep Camouflage, and Choose Your Own Beginning, her poems have appeared in various journals and she is the Director of Marketing and Development for The Free Books Project and Editor-in-Chief of Voicemail Poems.
Host: Aaren Perry
Open reading follows~
Hope to see you there!
10/30/2025
Virtual Poetry Reading
Sunday, November 2 - 2pm - Zoom link can be found on our website
Pound was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem The Cantos (c. 1917–1962).
Pound’s contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as a foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H. D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be “like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold”.
Pound moved to Italy in 1924, embraced Mussolini’s fascism, and expressed support for Hi**er. Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., whose doctors viewed Pound as a narcissist and a psychopath, but otherwise completely sane.
While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos, which were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy.
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This upcoming month we have a series of a poetry readings and book releases beginning on Tuesday, March 6th.
Tuesday, March 6th, 6:30 pm: Moonstone Poetry @ PhillyCam
Philly Loves the Poetry of Medicine with readers Jack Coulehan, David N. Moolten and Wynne Morrison (This event will air over Comcast Cable, channels 66/966 HD/967 and Verizon FIOS, channels 29/30).
Wednesday, March 7th, 7:00 pm: Moonstone Poetry @ Fergie’s Pub
Readings concerned with mental health, self-healing, nature and occurrences in everyday life. Our readers are Cole Bryson, Courtney Gambrell, and Melissa Rothman.
Sunday, March 11th, 2:00 pm: Moonstone @Fergie’s Pub
We will be hosting a book release and reading for our anthology, Philadelphia Says #MeToo. The #MeToo movement began in 2006 by Tarana Burke to promote empowerment and recognition for women of color who have experienced sexual abuse.
Wednesday, March 14th, 7:00 pm: Moonstone Poetry @ Fergie’s Pub
Guest readings by Autumn Konopa and Lorraine Henrie Lins. Konopa has hosted the Mad Poets monthly reading series in Bryn Mawr PA, for about five years and is deeply interested in the relationship between the arts and socioeconomic class. Lins is a Pennsylvania county Poet Laureate and the author of four books of poetry. Currently, she serves as the Director of New and Emerging Poets with Tekpoet.
Wednesday, March 21, 7:00 pm: Moonstone Poetry @ Fergie’s Pub
Thinking Green with readers Jacob Russell, Paul Siegell and Anne-Adele Wight.
Wednesday, March 28th, 7:00 pm: Moonstone Poetry @ Fergie’s Pub
Guest readings by Alexander Fraum, Maryann Helferty, John Mason and Joe Roarty. Fraum is a relatively new poet to Philadelphia’s circles. He is a substitute teacher in the Philadelphia school system; Fraum employs his knowledge of anthropology, environmental science, and religious studies in his work to provide intimate portraits of the circumstances people inhabit. Helferty worked a long career in the environmental field and explores and reports on the natural world through her poems and photography. Mason has written for various publications for over 25 years. He has read material at Najee’s Loft, Moonstone Arts Center, and Sedgewick Theater. Roarty, a former Moonstone Chapbook winner, produces poetry that is full of energy, passionate intelligence, jazz and heightened speech rhythms. He uses colloquialisms such as shorthand text messages to omit vowels and drive lines foward.
