We will be celebrating the release of this long-awaited volume, number five in the Citizens for Decent Literature “This is Poetry” series, focusing on different areas of the United States. This volume focuses on poets of the Northeast. A project of the Literary Underground, Citizens for Decent Literature Press has published poetry for over a decade, off and on. This reading will be part of the annual Easton Book Festival in October 2026. www.eastonbookfestival.com Copies of the anthology will be available at the Small Press Expo and at Book and Puppet bookstore in downtown Easton.
Please join contributing poets from the poetry anthology “This is Poetry Volume 5: Northeast Poets” for a reading in celebration of the collection, the importance of the literary underground, and independent presses and creative networks to push back on censorship and corporatocracy.
Featuring Michele McDannold, Puma Perl, Eliot Katz, Nicca Ray, E. Lynn Alexander, and more. This event will be virtual and streamed online.
The anthology is a project of The Literary Underground, published by Citizens For Decent Literature Press- so named because of the pro-censorship advocacy group founded in 1956 that sought government control over literature. The press believes that free expression is essential, cultural gatekeeping and banning to be harmful, and that pushing back against censorship of words and book banning remains a fight whose champions cannot ever consider to be won as are always groups who want to control what we read, watch, and listen to. There will always be groups who see information and ideas and learning and freedom as threats to their agenda of control. This anthology celebrates poetry and freedom of expression.
Zoom Link
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88155608680
About the Poets:
Michele McDannold
Michele McDannold has organized poetry events and performed poetry with a bunch of unabashed free-thinkers across this great United States by plane, train or coincidence. She spends her time producing and publishing books. Roadside Press published her collection, Collected Poems 2005-2025. She is the founder of The Literary Underground.
Eliot Katz
Called “another classic New Jersey bard” by Allen Ginsberg, Eliot Katz is the author of seven books of poetry—including Unlocking the Exits and Love, War, Fire, Wind–, and a prose book, “The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg”. A book of his new and selected poems, Liberation Recalled, is currently being translated into Italian for publication in Rome, and he was recently named a Lifetime New Generation Beat Poet Laureate by the National Beat Poetry Foundation. Katz, whose late mother was a Holocaust survivor, has worked for many years as an activist for a wide range of peace and social-justice causes. He lives in Hoboken, NJ and you can visit his website.
Nicca Ray
Nicca Ray was raised in Los Angeles, not far from the Griffith Park Planetarium where scenes from her father, Nicholas Ray’s, most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause, were shot. First inspired by the New York Dolls performing on the Real Don Steele Show, she became heavily involved in the L.A. punk scene by the time she was 15, spending many wild nights at Hollywood clubs. At age 20, she began work on getting sober, and shortly after, moved to New York, where, in her early 30s, was accepted into the New School University. While a student she published short stories in various journals, made two short films—including one that screened at the New York Underground Film Festival—and starred in Cutting Moments, the first film in the underground gore classic series, Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America, directed by Douglas Buck. After graduating in 1999, at thirty-eight years old, she devoted her life to researching and interviewing people about her father’s life, for which “Ray by Ray” is a culmination. She currently lives in New York City.
Puma Perl
Puma Perl is a poet, writer, and performer and the author of two chapbooks, and three full-length poetry collections including Birthdays Before and After (Beyond Baroque Books.) She’s the front woman and primary lyricist in The Puma Perl Band, which brings spoken word together with rock and roll. She’s received five awards from the New York Press Association in recognition of her journalism and was the recipient of the 2016 Acker Award in the category of writing. In 2024, with musician Joe Sztabnik, she released a record album, “Under Tenement Skies,” available on Bandcamp.com and you can read more on Substack, https://substack.com/@pumaperl
E. Lynn Alexander
E. Lynn Alexander is a local poet, artist, event host, independent press pusher, and zine/book maker. Her book of poetry, “Find Me in the Iris” explores the ongoing themes in her work of shame language, internalized expectations and coercive conditioning, and the regulating norms and binaries that perpetuate power systems and control with shame as a weapon that reaches us through the internalized voices of effacement that we wrongfully come to recognize as our own. “In this shouldspeak, we not only lessen, we are digested.” She believes that the poet life, artist life, loving life, covalidating life- is a life that pushes back and the spaces we make are where we inhabit our own messy loudness, with agency, where we can refuse to be their commodities. Collapse Press: www.collapsepress.com https://www.collapsepress.com
