Dear Friends of Poetry,
On Thursday, June 18, 2026, Poetry Night will feature the poets Robin Becker and Danielle Lemay. We meet at 7 p.m. inside the spacious John Natsoulas Gallery at 521 1st Street in Davis, and we hope you can join us!
Our featured poet for June 18 will be Robin Becker.
Becker was born in Philadelphia and earned a BA and MA at Boston University. She taught for many years at MIT before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994, where she is Liberal Arts Research Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State. She served as Penn State Laureate in 2010–11.
Her new book, Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2026 as part of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, gathers the best work from her eight previous collections alongside nearly thirty new poems. Together they trace a lifetime of poetic exploration — of Jewish identity, queer life, art history, grief, beauty, and compassion. Her previous collections include Personal Effects (1977); Backtalk (1982); Giacometti’s Dog (1990); All-American Girl (1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award; The Horse Fair (2000); Domain of Perfect Affection (2006); Tiger Heron (2014); and The Black Bear Inside Me (2018). Poet Stephen Dunn has written that Becker achieves “what may be one of the early twenty-first century’s most difficult accomplishments — to write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn’t pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences.”
Becker’s work has appeared widely in American Poetry Review, the Boston Globe, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She is a contributing editor to Ploughshares and poetry editor for the Women’s Review of Books. She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Also reading on June 18 will be Danielle Lemay.
Lemay is a poet and scientist living in central California. By day she is the principal investigator of a government science lab and serves as an Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Davis, where she earned her PhD in Nutritional Biology. She also holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, where she first studied poetry. She has authored over 60 peer-reviewed scientific articles, but her poetry, she says, is about a different kind of discovery: emotional truth.
Lemay’s poetry won the Emerging Writers Award from Boulevard and has been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. Her work has appeared in Typehouse Literary Magazine, The Comstock Review, SWWIM Every Day, One Art, Literary Mama, The Sunlight Press, and many other journals.
You are invited to visit the Facebook page for this event.
Doors and open-mic signups open at around 6:30 p.m.; the first featured reader begins at 7 p.m.; open mic starts at 8 p.m. Open mic performers will be asked to limit what they share to two items or four minutes, whichever is shorter. The open mic list is typically full by 6:45 p.m. People who show up early to help set up chairs will always earn a spot on the open mic list. We expect open mic favorites Michael Gallowglas, Mercedes Ibañez, Joe Bacchus, and Allegra Silberstein to perform.
Find out more about the Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting https://www.poetryindavis.com. Encourage your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, see some of his recent essays on Substack: https://andyjones.substack.com/. One post lists the almost 400 poets who have ever featured at the Poetry Night Reading Series. His most recent post concerns the retirement of Religious Studies professor and poet Naomi Janowitz.
Upcoming Poetry Night readers will include Kelli Russell Agodon, Katie Peterson, Wendy Silk, Dianna Henning, Lara Gularte, Terry Moore, Julia Levine, and others.
Please plan to join us on every first and third Thursday of the month at 7 p.m. at the John Natsoulas Gallery for the Poetry Night Reading Series.
Our next Poetry Night event takes place on July 2 and will feature Dianna Henning and Lara Gularte. Plan to join us!
