RHINO 50th Anniversary Launch: Reading & Open Mic

Name: RHINO 50th Anniversary Launch: Reading & Open Mic
Start: 2026-05-23T16:00:00-05:00
Location: Bad Coffee, 1801 W Berteau Ave, Chicago, IL 60613

Schedule

Sat, 23 May, 2026 at 04:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Bad Coffee, 1801 W Berteau Ave, Chicago, IL 60613 | Chicago, IL

Join RHINO at Bad Coffee in Ravenswood to celebrate launch of RHINO 2026 and the start of our 50th year!
We'll have eight incredible RHINO contributors reading, followed by an open mic.
Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. A trans Iranian-American poet, medium, and critic, she is the author of BATTALION SHAPED GIRL (DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, 2025) and Behnt (New Delta Review, 2026), selected by Dorothea Lasky as the winner of The New Delta Review Chapbook Prize. Her work appears in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, Fairy Tale Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at RHINO Poetry and was a Claudia Emerson Scholar at the 2025 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.
Matthew Buxton is a queer writer originally from Salt Lake City. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Chicago Review, Bat City Review, RHINO Poetry, swamp pink, New Delta Review, Tupelo Press, The Spectacle, & Change, Frozen Sea, which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize, and others. He is the author of the chapbook Exaltation: A Space Opera, published by Bottlecap Press, and he holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. His work has been recognized by the Fine Arts Work Center and the Vermont Studio Center. He now lives and teaches in Chicago.
Curtis L. Crisler was born and raised in Gary, Indiana. Crisler, an award-winning poet/author, has six poetry books, two YA books, and five poetry chapbooks. He’s the Indiana Poet Laureate and Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne.
Timothy David Rey is a Chicago-based writer/performer His work has appeard in and been performed at: Obsideian, Fifty Inches from Center, Black Horse Review, the Poetry Foundation and elsewhere. He is a 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow, a 2023 semi-finalist for the Eugene O'Neil National Playwrighrs Conference, and a 25/26 New City Chicago Lit 50 mention. He is the co-curator of the summer reading series, Poetry At the Green, which is a 2026 Time Out Chicago pick for Top 10 Reading Series in the city.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their typewriters who compose poetry on demand. Winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize for her poetry collection Where Are the Snows (Texas Review Press, 2022), Rooney is the author of five novels, including the forthcoming Man Overboard! (Gallery, 2026) and the co-author—with her sister Beth Rooney—of the picture book Leaf Town Forever (University of Minnesota Press, 2025). She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay.
Robin Seiler lives in Chicago and attends Northwestern University’s MFA + MA program. Her poems can be found or forthcoming in the L'Ephemere Review, Silk + Smoke, Bowery Gothic, and RHINO.
Steven and Maja Teref translate from Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. Their latest book is Milena Marković’s sympathy for the salami, longlisted for the 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry. Other translations include Ana Ristović’s Directions for Use, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Best Translated Book Award, and the National Translation Award. Steven co-edited with Aleksandar Bošković Zenithism (1921–1927): A Yugoslav Avant-GardeAnthology and is the editor for Academic Studies Press’ Companions to Slavic Literature series. Maja teaches at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where she is also the faculty advisor for the student-run literary translation journal Ouroboros Review. The Terefs are members of the Third Coast Translators Collective.