A POETRY EVENING: Chuck Salmons, Roy Bentley, Sandra Feen, Cliff Treyens!

Join four acclaimed local poets for an evening filled with poetry and conversation: (The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News), (Surviving the Eremocene), and Sandra Feen and Cliff Treyens (There’s a Rock on Martin Avenue).

Registration is free. All poetry collections will be available at the event.

OHIO POETRY ASSOCIATION is Gramercy’s Community Partner for this poetry evening.

Roy Glenn Bentley is an Appalachian-American poet and creative writing professor. The lives of the poor in America are the primary focus of his work. He has been published in poetry journals as well as in four books of poetry and ten chapbooks. Roy is a five-time recipient of Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship awards and has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His latest collection, is about what is at the heart of the heroics (and heartache) of being an American.

Award-winning poet Chuck Salmons has published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Chiron Review, Evening Street Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and Northern Appalachia Review. Surviving the Eremocene (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025) is his fourth collection where Salmons explores and expands upon the meaning of Eremocene, or Age of Loneliness, a term popularized by biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson. Through narrative poems full of rich details, humor, and wisdom, Salmons examines his own Ohio upbringing and sense of place in the Midwest as an immediate descendant of Appalachians.

, co-authored by Sandra Feen and Cliff Treyens, chronicles stories from the real-life “Breakfast Club”—a group of heart-warming seniors bonded together in the last years of life. Through prose and poetry, the authors turn the tables onto their parents and friends to reveal experiences from the serious to momentous to hilarious while celebrating the uniqueness inherent to people. With candor, humor, and poignancy, the book examines the ravages of aging that ultimately enrich their caregivers and the reader.

Sandra Feen taught 32 years for the Columbus City Schools and was the 2022-2024 Ohio Beat Poet Laureate. She is the author of three poetry collections, besides the multi-genre book There Is a Rock On Martin Avenue she wrote with Cliff Treyens.Feen is a member of the poetry troupe Concrete Wink, the Ohio Poetry Association, and Bistro critique group. She performs work by Holocaust writers in Susan Millard Schwarz's Anahata Music Project, and co-hosts The Muse’s Mic, an interview series for writers and artists, with James Bryant.

Cliff Treyens' 40-year writing career spans newspaper reporting, political communications, marketing, public relations, and public education. His "15 minutes of fame" occurred in 1983 as a member of the reporting team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Public Service for the (Jackson, Mississippi) Clarion-Ledger. He also has written Whatever’s Fair: The Political Autobiography of Ohio House Speaker Vern Riffe published by The Kent State University Press in 2007.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Gramercy Books