Our Response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak

As a precaution to help limit the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) and care for our community, Just Buffalo Literary Center has postponed a number of events, and we will follow the guidance of Buffalo Public Schools in terms of Just Buffalo Writing Center programming.

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It may have been Annette Daniel Taylor’s booming voice introducing poets coming up to the mic, it may have been the warm red light shining on Julian Montague’s mural (painted by James Moffit), or it may have been the ephemeral poems from Adam Drury’s POEMATIC 900, but if you walked by Washington St. on October 11th, you definitely witnessed some type of magic that transformed an early fall Thursday.

Whoever said memes can’t be art doesn’t have a sense of humor, or of art for that matter--and they definitely haven’t met Travis Sharp. That idea was one of the jumping-off points at the Drawing Words & Writing Visual Texts workshop he ran at the Just Buffalo Writing Center in early October. Sharp, a PhD student in the Poetics program at SUNY Buffalo, centered the first day of workshop around the visual and physical structure of letters and words.

Do you have any second parts in your life? Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Points of Departure (see WBFO's coverage here) opened with the above question posed by Bishnu Adhikari. It was question that did not require a response but demanded some thought, much like everything else that morning.

In March, young writers of the JBWC, Hannah and Trinity, performed at University at Buffalo’s North Campus as finalists of the UB English/Poetics riverrun Poetry Prize. As part of the Robert Creeley Lecture and Celebration of Poetry, the winner was announced by judge and Just Buffalo’s Artistic Director, Barbara Cole, following the finalists’ readings. The winner, a senior from Nichols School, performed her winning poem alongside our JB poets.