April 13th Monday at Mahall's will feature Christine Howey and Lee Chilcote, guest hosted by Ray McNiece

Ray McNiece will be our guest host this month. Christine Howey and Lee Chilcote will be our featured poets. Open mic will follow.

Lee Chilcote is editor of Fresh Water Cleveland and a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in many publications. He has a master's in English and Creative Nonfiction from CSU, and his essays and poems have appeared in Whiskey Island, Paddlefish, Steamticket, Belt and other publications.

While studying at CSU, he won the Leonard Trawick Creative Writing Prize for nonfiction writing. He was also the second place winner in the 2014 Lakeland Community College poetry writing contest and a finalist in the 2014 Best Cleveland poem contest. He is a former board member of the late, great Poets and Writers League of Greater Cleveland and the Lit, and is interested in building community through writing and building a community of writers in Northeast Ohio.

Lee has taught writing at Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland State University and through the Cuyahoga County Public Library. He created and leads a local author book club called Read Local. He hosts a Facebook page, Literary Cleveland, to market readings and literary events. Lee was a finalist in the 2015 Accelerate civic pitch competition, sponsored by the Cleveland Leadership Center. Together with Amy Rosenbluth of Lake Erie Ink, he aims to create a literary unconference in downtown Cleveland this summer. Contact him to get involved.  

Christine Howey is a performance poet and her one-person show of poetry, Exact Change, had its world premiere at Cleveland Public Theatre in January, 2014. Also, it is scheduled to have a two-weekend, four-performance run at Playhouse Square in downtown Cleveland on June 12-13 and June 26-27, 2015. Her chapbook, If You Find Yourself Submerged in a Pond Under Ice, was published in 2011, as was an art book of her poem Inside, Out. Her poems have appeared in Pudding Magazine, Star Line and Muse, and in the anthologies What I Knew Before I Knew, Mercury Retrograde, While You Were Sleeping I Dreamt a Poem, Open Earth and multiple Hessler Street Fair poetry anthologies.

Christine is the theater critic for Cleveland Scene, in addition to posting reviews on her blog, Rave and Pan. She has been named Best Critic in Ohio by both the Press Club of Cleveland and the Society of Professional Journalists. Christine has had numerous articles published in The Plain Dealer, Northern Ohio Live magazine, Cleveland Free Times, Newsweek/Daily Beast, NBC News, Dame and many other publications. She is a former stage actor and director, primarily at Dobama Theatre in Cleveland Heights.