October 25
Poetry Event

Join us to listen to some poetry—or share some writing of your own—at Poetry in the Boro at Dapper Owl on Sunday evening, October 25.

Evelyn Berry, on her book tour of Tennessee, will be our feature. Read more about Evelyn below.

The feature will be at 6:00, with open mic to follow. Drip coffee and light nibbles will be available at no charge. However, we hope that you’ll order from Dapper Owl’s tasty menu to help make this a winning collaboration for all of us! Their menu includes coffee, tea, beer, cider, chips, and baked goods.

Arrival by 5:45 recommended so that the Owl's staff can take care of most food and drink orders before we get our program started.

About the open mic

Our open mic is lottery-style when demand exceeds available slots. Here's how it works:

• Sign up for the open mic on site anytime from 5:30 to 6:00 PM.

• At 6:00 PM, our team puts everyone registered for the open mic into a random number generator and draws 15-18 names. After the feature, we start announcing our open mic slots.

• We always reserve a few slots for first-timers to our open mic.

• Open mic readers can share poetry or spoken word: 1 poem or three minutes, whichever comes first. Reading a favorite poem by another writer is fine, too. Sign up for the open mic on site. Sign ups begin when doors open at 5:30. No early admittance.

• While we welcome all styles of poetry, we ask that readers be prepared to keep their pieces “PG-13” depending on our audience, which sometimes includes younger people.

Location and parking tips

The Dapper Owl coffee pub is located at 2412 East Main St. just past its intersection with Rutherford Blvd., on the east side of the MTSU campus. Overflow parking is on the Arnold Lane side of the building – pull in perpendicular to the building to allow more cars to fit (careful of the AC unit!) or park on the side of road down Arnold Lane (please don’t block any driveways).

About our feature

Evelyn Berry is the trans, Southern author of the poetry collection Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2024) and the chapbooks Buggery (Bateau Press, 2020) and T4T (Harbor Editions, 2026). Her novella Dang is forthcoming from Loblolly Press in 2027. She is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and South Carolina Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship for Poetry. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Raleigh Review, The Normal School, Gigantic Sequins, Longleaf Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbia, SC with her partners and their cats.

Challenge words

If you like, write a new piece to share that includes one, some, or ALL of these words, selected by our audience at our last gathering:

fly | Halloween | owl | copious | gossip | childhood | bite | avert | paint | above | alpenglow

We rely on your donations

ADMISSION IS FREE. A DONATION of $5 or more is appreciated to help us offset our costs. You can donate using PayPal at paypal.me/poetryintheboro. We also accept donations on site.

Poetry in the Boro thanks the Rutherford Arts Alliance and MTSU Write for their on-going partnerships and support.