Back by popular demand — join us for another installment of Verses & Vino! Our featured readers are Joan Barasovska of Pittsboro, VP of Membership for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and Liza Wolff-Francis, the current Poet Laureate of Carrboro. Both poets will be reading from their newly released books, which will be available for purchase. Wine and cheese will be served; must be 21+ to attend.

This event is open to the community.

Joan Barasovska’s Unblessed, Unsung is the deeply-researched story of her mother’s bitter family history in this country: an immigrant story, a WWII story, an American story. The cover photo is her parents’ wedding portrait. Michael S. Glaser, former Poet Laureate of Maryland, writes, “This book is a powerful narrative for our time...Unblessed, Unsung documents the struggle of an immigrant Jewish survivor’s granddaughter to piece together her family history from the fragmentary evidence of old photographs and thin threads of family stories. It is love, Barasovska concludes, that continues to sustain, like the blue glow of the ‘Sabbath candle flame.’”

Liza Wolff-Francis’ 48 hours down the shore tells a poetic tale of three women writers in Atlantic City, New Jersey experiencing a place of gulls and ocean contrasted and combined with grit and hardship all as a metaphor for a beloved “Merica.” Down the shore there are Monarch butterflies, panhandling children, mezuzahs on condominium doors, menstruation, beach walks, casino gamblers, and the climate crisis. In anticipation of a coming storm, these poems are present in the now and all that is both simultaneously beautiful and sad about this Monopoly-street country. We are deep in Capitalism, Patriarchy, and the climate crisis. Together we can find our way out.