Poetry Reading and Open Mic @ The Loop

Join us for a night of poetry at The Loop Sun Prairie! This event will feature readings from Steven Espada Dawson, Chessy Normille and Mandy Moe Pwint Tu. 

No registration is required to attend the event, but if you would like to perform at the Open Mic, registration is encouraged, using the form below. 

Open Mic

After our featured readings, we will open the floor up for an Open Mic. Share your poems with us! If you would like to read during the Open Mic, please sign up using the form below. Readers will have up to 5 minutes to share their work. Walk-ins may also be accepted on the day of the event. 

About the poets: 

Steven Espada Dawson is from East Los Angeles. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he is a former Ruth Lilly Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow. His poems appear in many journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance. He has taught creative writing at universities, libraries, and prisons across the country. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as poet laureate.

Chessy Normile wrote Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, which won the 2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The New York Times said it was one of the best poetry books of 2020 and a fitness influencer online said it made 50 minutes on the elliptical fly by. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The American Poetry Review, and jubilat. Her chapbook, Proceedings of the Ordinary Annual General Meeting, was published by After Hours Editions in 2024. She lives in Madison, WI. 

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter and Unsprung, were published by Thirty West Publishing House (2022) and Newfound (2023) respectively. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is from Yangon, Myanmar.