Sunday, October 25th 6 pm: No, Thank You w/ Katie Kane, Stevie Chedid & Dylan Running Crane
IF YOU WANT TO HOST A READING, PERFORMANCE, OR STUDY GROUP AT THE LIBRARY OR BECOME A POETRY LIBRARIAN GET IN TOUCH !! email us: pleasepoetrylibrary@gmail.com
Monday Night Writer’s Gymnastics and [Pot]Luck, 6-8 pm, “WITHIN EARSHOT” W/ Celia and Alicia
In part one of this poetry workshop on listening we will work with the range and distance of our “ears.” We will go outside to listen, we will turn in to listen, we will meet each other with our eyes and listen.
featuring their non-fiction, fiction, poems, and music.
Katie Kane is working on a first person plural memoir that is meant to help her understand her family. She is also finalizing an academic manuscript, "The Deep North: Cowboy Fascism, Energy Extraction, and Indigenous Resistance.”
Dylan Running Crane is a singer-songwriter from Browning, Montana, a place that remains the subject of most of her work. She sings songs about the epic and melancholy duality of personhood and identity and also some songs about being a kinder friend to spiders written by your favorite Indin in the whole world.
Stevie Chedid received her MFA from the University of Montana, where she held the Truman Capote Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Longreads, The New York Times Magazine, Orion Magazine (forthcoming), The Sun, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Recent works of hers have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, John Burroughs Award, The Best American Essays, and named a finalist for Best of Net 2026. Chedid is the nonfiction editor of New Orleans Review and her debut book is soon to be out on submission
A REMINDER THAT OUR CAPACITY IS about ~35 people so come early <3 Thank you <3.
We are throwing it back to reading/writing night!! Bring your book. First half potluck second half sustained silent reading. Who knows, we might do some writing with our reading...
No, Thank You: poems, movement, and music from four ABSOLUTE TALENTS Sunday, September 27th @ 5pm.
ALERT
ALERT our capacity is about ~35 people so come early and if you come
late be ready to rotate in and out…. PS if you know of a larger and
affordable space in town with an amenable landlord Holler.... PLEASECaroline Ganci Patterson is an “ex-suburbanite-revisionist.” poems have appeared in Yale Review, Columbia Review, Foglifter, and more. They are a senior reader at Ploughshares and editorial assistant and reader at Copper Canyon Press. They are a librarian at the Please and a promoter of inquiry at the Missoula Art Museum.
Lerch is a Montana-based sister duo that uses sparse instrumentals(shameless advertisement: bandmates wanted) and harmonies to explore storytelling and shared experiences of love and memory.
Alyssa Kennamer is a mover and maker in Missoula, MT.
What makes a question good? What makes a question bad? And when—if at all—is a good time to ask one? Who am I saying I am when I ask you to explain who you are? In this inquiry-based poetry workshop we will interrogate the antics of interrogation, answering it all only to discover what happens when it all goes unanswered.
Caroline Ganci Patterson is an “ex-suburbanite-revisionist.” poems have appeared in Yale Review, Columbia Review, Foglifter, and more. They are a senior reader at Ploughshares and editorial assistant and reader at Copper Canyon Press. They are a librarian at the Please, Poetry Library and a promoter of inquiry at the Missoula Art Museum.
We’ll pick up experimental poems —
Some that make sense
Some that make none
And play with both.
Casper Lee is a poet from Wyoming. Currently they ranch and farm in Ledger, Montana. Their pigs are named Cinco and Souvenir.
This is part of a bi-weekly series of one to two hours generative writing workshops taught by rotating facilitators.
From Matsuo Basho and Baudelaire to Frank O’Hara and Ocean Vuong, walking has shaped writing. We will closely read a few poems together, take a short walk, and generate new writing based on what we experience. Bring something to write with and dress for the weather--your new poems can’t wait to meet you!
Jory Mickelson (they/them) is a writer and educator living in Xwotʼqom / Bellingham on the homelands of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. They are the author of three books of poetry: Picturing (2025), All This Divide (2024), and Wilderness//Kingdom (2019), which won a 2020 High Plains Book Award. Usually found in the moss and mud of the Pacific Northwest, this summer they are an Open AiR MT resident at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives.
No, Thank You: poems and music w/ Jory Mickelson, Addie Palin, Aria Peters + BIll Kautz Thursday July 23rd, 6-8pm
come join us for the fourth installment of No, Thank You, a multi-media performance series @ Please, Poetry Library!
Jory Mickelson (they/them) is a writer and educator living in Xwotʼqom / Bellingham on the homelands of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. They are the author of three books of poetry: Picturing (2025), All This Divide (2024), and Wilderness//Kingdom (2019), which won a 2020 High Plains Book Award. Usually found in the moss and mud of the Pacific Northwest, this summer they are an Open AiR MT resident at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives.
Addie Palin received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana, where she was the Richard Hugo Scholar. After fifteen years in the Chicago advertising community, she returned to western Montana, where she continues her work in that field. She is also serving her sixth year on the board for Open AIR, and will be in residency with Open AIR this fall in the Frank Church Wilderness.
Currently informed by the rural valley in which she lives, her writing attempts to blur the boundaries between human and other—the urgency of animals, the change of hands, and the shifting of seasons on lands that retain—to varying degrees—their wildness. While in part a commentary on the tension between humans and their environments, she uses this blurring primarily to describe relationships between people: love, disappointment, desire, neglect. Her poems value complex emotional landscapes over clear interpretation, with the intent to evoke specific feelings rather than deliver logical conclusions. Her first manuscript was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, the Colorado Prize, and the National Poetry Series, among others.
Trumpet player, composer and educator Bill Kautz has worked in a variety of creative music projects including work with Karl Blau, Michelle Boulé, Jen Gilleran, Cole Bronson, Jessica Catron, Jeremy Drake, Simon Henneman, LAKE, Michael Musick, Tricia Opstad, Naomi Siegel, Neil Welch, and as a leader/composer for his ensembles crosstalk and Golden Mean. Bill is the DJ and producer of Something Else, a weekly radio program featuring creative, improvised and modern classical music and in depth artist interviews on KBGA since 2017. Bill is a recipient of a 2023 and 2024 Montana Arts Council Strategic Investment Grant as well as a 2023 City of Missoula Public Art Committee Performance Grant.
Violinist Aria Peters grew up in Montana, studying with string educators in Great Falls and Billings. She received her Bachelor's degree in Music and History from St. Olaf College and a Master's in Teaching from Seattle University. She has performed with various groups in Seattle, WA including the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra and the Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra. Aria is currently active with the String Orchestra of the Rockies and Golden Mean in Missoula and the New Music Quartet in Northfield, MN. In addition to music, Aria teaches in Missoula County Public Schools as the High School English Language teacher, teaching English to newly arrived refugee and immigrant students.
She and Bill Kautz host a monthly composers workshop at Free Cycles called “New works, Reworks, Reimaginings” that is focused on elevating new music in the community and providing opportunities for artists to collaborate.
Their laurels:
Claire Tuna is a poet, gardener, and teaching artist in Northeast Los Angeles. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, The Southern Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Brooklyn Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and a royal blue ribbon from the Western Montana State Fair.
Yetta Rose Stein reads and writes in Livingston, Montana. Her work has appeared in POETRY, HAD, and elsewhere. She’s received support from Bread Loaf Writing Conference and holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’s a graduate of Hellgate high school and the daughter of Nancy and Gary.