Oddmonth Poetry Reading - Damian Rucci, Kara Knickerbocker, and Jay Orlando
Schedule
Sat Sep 27 2025 at 07:00 am to 08:30 am
UTC-04:00Location
5002 Penn Ave. Pittsburgh, PA 15224 | Pittsburgh, PA
Bios -Damian Rucci is a poet, performer, organizer, and is the unofficial poet laureate of every 711 in New Jersey. He has been rocking and rolling for the last ten years. He is the founder of the NJ Poetry Renaissance, a working class poetry movement that has been blowing up in the Garden State, & was the focus of Voices in the Garden on PBS. He hosts ten bomb poetry shows and is the author of a bunch of poetry books including And Even If I Did, So What? (Two Key Customs) and Poets Ruin Everything (Drone Bee Gazette). Over the last decade, his life has been an exciting one, performing over one thousand times around the country and going on debaucherous adventures.
Kara Knickerbocker is the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, HOBART, Portland Review, SWWIM, and the anthologies Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets, Crack the Spine, and more. Her work has received support from Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Murphy Writing at Stockton University, and the Gullkistan Center in Iceland. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee originally from Pennsylvania, she writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online at www.karaknickerbocker.com.
Jay Orlando was born & raised in a series of small towns in Mercer County, Pennsylvania & now resides in the much larger, but still small, town of Indiana, Pennsylvania. He is a rural, transmasculine writer whose work seeks to reclaim religious imagery & uplift the Appalachian LGBTQ experience. His debut poetry collection, ‘A Tangled Lineage’ is available now through Redhawk Publications or on Amazon. You can follow his work & antics on Instagram @jaybird.orlando
