Friday Night Open: Raisa Tolchinsky & Tiffany Troy

Join Brooklyn Poets for Friday Night Open, which begins with an open mic and culminates in readings by two featured poets. Our featured poets on April 26th will be Raisa Tolchinsky & Tiffany Troy.

6:00 PM: open mic signup begins

6:30 to 7:45 PM: open mic

8 to 8:30 PM: featured readers

Each reader for the open mic can read for up to a four-minute set. Participants can purchase one of eight tickets in advance to reserve an open mic spot. Once those tickets sell out, all other participants who’d like to read for the open mic can purchase a ticket to sign up at the door on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will be time for about 16–18 readers.

Guests can purchase tickets to attend in person at 144 Montague Street or virtually via Zoom (note: virtual guests cannot read for the open mic). For in-person attendance, advance online ticket sales end at 5 PM on the day of the event. After that, tickets for in-person attendance can be purchased at the door until we reach capacity. Tickets for virtual attendance will be available until 6:30 PM. A Zoom link will be emailed to all ticket holders. Participants are encouraged to purchase tickets in advance for in-person attendance, as there are limited seats. Brooklyn Poets members take $5 off.

Note that by participating in the Friday Night Open, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy. Effective January 8, 2024, all events attendees except readers at a safe distance on stage are required to wear masks due to the current rise in cases in NYCOur full policy can be found at the end of the event description. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.

Closed captions will be available for the event through the Zoom livestream. For more information and to request additional accommodations, contact us at [email protected].

Featured Poets

Raisa Tolchinsky is the author of the poetry collection Glass Jaw (Persea Books, 2024), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in 2023. She has published poems in Boston ReviewKenyon ReviewMichigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Raisa earned her MFA from the University of Virginia and her BA from Bowdoin College. She was the 2022–2023 George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and is currently a student at Harvard Divinity School. Previously, Raisa lived in Chicago, Bologna (Italy) and New York City, where she trained as a boxer

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and cotranslator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert / El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the managing editor at Tupelo Quarterly, associate editor of Tupelo Press and book review coeditor at the Los Angeles Review.